6 ms·

There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology

There is no reason to use a synology device anymore with RPI’s having sata shields and other SoC boards that are readily available that run Linux. Yes, Synology was easy but so is the decision to not ever use them again…

deelowe 1y ago
Can a pi achieve the same iops? I'd be highly suspecious of any such claims.
- dangus 1y ago
  500MB/s NVMe via the M.2 hat. It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity. Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.
  - tzs 1y ago
    Oh wow...I'm surprised at 500 MB/s NVMe. I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s. I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4 to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant, but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5 would actually give much noticeable performance improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to replace the 3.
    - dangus 1y ago
      I guess this is a side note personally don’t think any of the Raspberry Pi hardware is worth it unless you are using the GPIO pins or any of those not-NAS not-PC type of functionality the Pi offers. I think for general compute it’s hard to make it make sense. I think there are a whole lot of mini PC type of solutions that just make more overall sense.
- pdimitar 1y ago
  I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after. Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs, spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you have the server in your bedroom / living room, install modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.
  - oakesm9 1y ago
    For homelabs, yer you can get something much better for much less. For use cases where consistency and future support is key (education and industry) you really can't beat a Raspberry Pi. Their hardware and software support is top class. The first Raspberry Pi is still supported by the latest version of their OS over a decade later and it's even still being manufactured. For all their products they commit to long term availability. For example, the Pi 5 will be in active production until at least January 2036 (assuming the company itself exists of course). For anyone with a fleet of these, that's an amazing commitment. It means that when a piece of hardware breaks you can buy a band new but identical piece of hardware to replace it. For most other companies you'd need to buy a different piece of hardware. Yes, the specs would be better, but now you have a fleet with mixed hardware which _you_ need to support and maintain going forwards.
    - pdimitar 1y ago
      Oh, I see. It's about fleets of easy-to-manage / predictable-to-support machines. That's valid, thanks for making me aware. And indeed I was wondering about homelabs. RPis were never good there, not even when they got out for the first time. The form factor is what won over people back then. Feature- and speed-wise they were always mostly substandard. Not to mention Linux kernel support and driver issues (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked, admittedly). And I agree on the fleet thing. Best if you can flash an SD card, drive to the spot in meatspace, pluck away the broken RPi, plug the new one in, wait for boot, test, drive away. Heard people doing that with RPis and others.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Because for $40 I have a system that runs at a decent speed. For $300 I could get an ITX to run. So for the cost of an ITX, I could run a dozen RPIs. Who wants to have a server running in their bedroom? Have you heard the noise those things make? Sorry, no.
- reactordev 1y ago
  Around 200-270MiB/s is what has been publicly benched. I’m sure there’s someone squeezing 300 out of one. The PCIe bus in an RPI is Gen 2 so it’s not that fast. The point isn’t whether an RPI is a Synology device. The point is there are other ways of having a cheap NAS other than Synology. Hell, a Beelink with an external USB 3.0 HDD rack would also do just fine.
- procaryote 1y ago
  Do you need it to?
dangus 1y ago
Another way to put this is that Synology misjudged their customers' appetite for alternatives. The ease of use of the Synology solution was always a plus of the product, but Synology misjudged the values and abilities of its core customer. They also misjudged the rapidly maturing market of competitors (e.g., why am I buying a Synology instead of UGREEN?) Their core customer always had the ability to set up their own NAS in a more manual way, they just didn't really want to have to do that when an easier solution was available. This isn't a situation like iCloud where the whole purpose of the product is to provide a service that 99% of the customer base doesn't know how to do on their own. For a typical Synology customer, setting up their own TrueNAS box is something that probably only takes an hour including watching a YouTube setup tutorial. The person who is considering a Synology solution in the first place tends to be highly technical to begin with.
- throwaway173738 1y ago
  I can confirm that I bought a Synology NAS because I didn’t want to tinker with the backup system for my family’s data. And when I read about the drive requirements for a new Synology NAS I decided that tinkering might not be such a bad thing. They really screwed up.
  - caconym_ 1y ago
    Same. I like my Synology unit well enough but I see a trend toward less openness, toward greed (including removing capabilities from units they've already sold) and toward a decline of their business as a result of tanking customer goodwill. So they no longer seem like a reliable bet for the long term, which is what I'm looking for in a NAS.
- sumtechguy 1y ago
  That is exactly where I am. The value prop on synology has fallen off. Esp since they have let their kernel rot. There are tons of perf they are leaving on the table. The default external ports are usually 1g and most others have moved to at least 2.5g. I just wanted something I just didnt have to mess with a lot. And could pop in an external USB drive here and there. Other solutions will fill that need just fine too. Just didnt really want to fiddle with DIY.
mrob 1y ago
Which SoC boards have ECC ram? ECC ram is essential for any reliable data storage system. Disks have built-in error correcting codes, and RAID can detect errors, but none of this helps if the data is corrupted in RAM before it ever reaches the disk.
- reactordev 1y ago
  The RPI CM5…
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrob 1y ago
    The specs claim "ECC" [0], but give no further details. ejolson on the Raspberry Pi forums [1] thinks it is on-die ECC, not traditional ECC, which would mean transfers between the RAM and the memory controller are not protected and there are no means of monitoring errors or triggering a kernel panic if there's an uncorrectable error. Some discussion on Reddit [2] also suggests it's on-die ECC. If this is true, it's better than nothing but still not a replacement for a NAS with traditional ECC RAM. [0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?variant=cm5-104032 https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia... [1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296449 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspberry_pi_cm5_ecc_memory_details/ https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspb...
    - reactordev 1y ago
      The chip is the memory controller… Yes it’s on-die. Yes it has error reporting. Don’t spread fud. There isn’t a dedicated chip because there doesn’t need to be. Broadcom BCM2712
      - mrob 1y ago
        In that case I incorrectly thought (like the other forum posters) it was like DDR5 on-die ECC. What you describe is better than DD5 on-die ECC. Is this error reporting supported by Linux? Is there some way I can do fault injection (e.g. undervolting the RAM) to check it's working?
izacus 1y ago
This is just another version of "why Dropbox when rsync" and equally silly.
- reactordev 1y ago
  What is silly about building your own? Explain? If rsync works for you, why would you buy Dropbox? “Why Lamborghini when Honda” is equally as silly yet I’ve seen them race head to head. Honda won.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    I don't agree with the grandparent comment... I don't think it's silly. But building your own doesn't scale to all the things. For everybody who wants to build their own X, the same person doesn't also want to build their Y and Z. They will eventually need to buy some products. So there will generally always be a market for pre-packaged solutions. For example: someone building an app may need network storage. They may not also want to block the building of the app on the building of the network storage.
    - reactordev 1y ago
      In which case enjoy your Synology DRM and don’t complain that an RPi or ITX DIY build isn’t comparable…
  - wat10000 1y ago
    There's nothing silly about building your own. What's silly is declaring a convenient, user-friendly product to be pointless because it's possible for a skilled person with a lot of free time to build their own. If you want to build your own Dropbox with rsync, go wild, have fun, we'd all love to see what you come up with. But I don't have time for that. My family doesn't have the skills for that. Dropbox is great for us, and building our own is not a realistic alternative.
- dgacmu 1y ago
  It really isn't, though. 1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing approximately equivalent functionality 2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as easy. I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time when Synology offered something quite better than the alternatives, but that time is no longer. My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to the races. It cost more than buying the individual components would have, but it had zero headache and was cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from Synology.
pbronez 1y ago
Ubiquiti smelled the blood in the water and released a whole new NAS product line. They don’t run arbitrary apps but for basic storage on the network they look pretty solid.
- sylens 1y ago
  I have a DS923+ and it's been great as a combo storage device and low-powered Docker host for homelab stuff. But if I had to replace it, I would break it apart into pure storage (like the Ubiquiti device) and a mini PC to run as a server.
nottorp 1y ago
For one rPIs are severely i/o limited still. May be fine with one ssd. For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and forget about it, they aren't. But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box... And three, the latest Pis have started to require active cooling. Might as well go low power x86 then.
- reactordev 1y ago
  My point is there are alternatives, like you said.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    The alternative to a Synology NAS isn't RPi. There are plenty of alternatives - QNAP, UGreen, a tower running TrueNAS - but a messy pile of overpriced unreliable SoCs attached to SATA hats isn't an alternative for a single device with multiple hard drive bays, consistent power and cooling, and easy management.
    - reactordev 1y ago
      The alternative is anything not Synology that can do NAS with SATA SSD or NVMe storage. That’s it. Anything more than that is in a class of enterprise servers that deserve its own discussion over a simple DS1522+
      - Arainach 1y ago
        This is nonsense. Both a horse and a pickup truck can be used to pull a wagon, but no one seriously considers one an alternative to the other. What you are describing is a hobby item for enthusiasts who want to enjoy tinkering, setting something crazy up and constantly debugging it. That is very much NOT the market of people who buy Synology products. Synology is not a JBOD RAID. It is an appliance that does many things (storage, services, web access, etc.) and can automatically keep itself up to date with no additional contact necessary. It can be hooked up to a UPS for resilience. If you have a problem there are support forums and online articles. It can be synced to other Synology devices at other sites. Etc., etc. A pile of RPi is none of that.
ekianjo 1y ago
you dont even Pi and sata shields, just buy a SOC that has direct M2 ports...
j45 1y ago
Storage should be a home appliance, not critical stuff to maintain and manage. The ability to hot swap a drive when it needs replacement without a disruption to one's life is what a NAS is for.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I feel like hot swap is great if you work in a datacenter, but in order to be a useful benefit in a home setting, you have to have new, replacement hard drives sitting around on a shelf somewhere. My RAID alarm went off about a year ago warning me that a drive was failing, and I had to place an order and wait a week. Plus, the amount of time it took for the HW RAID controller to rebuild the new drive, I probably could have restored from a full backup.
  - j45 1y ago
    I don't need my data offline when it doesn't have to be. You don't need extra drives sitting around. When one fails, you buy one, Amazon can have it over in a day, or local shops. If it's not realistic for that, having one spare isn't a bad thing. If you replace with a larger capacity drive, the existing raid only uses the same size to keep the raid. Depending on the drives you are using, SMR technology can take much much longer to rebuild a raid than CMR. Self-storage should be like a cloud - people need to rely on it like a cloud provider. Hot swap is a negligible cost over the 5-10 years you keep a NAS. Hot swap chassis whether it's one you buy or a Synology/QNAP, etc is the way to go. Hot swap used to cost a ton, it's considerably come down market. Storage is like a home appliance for me, just because I could build a stove doesn't mean I should. I've spent enough time swapping hard drives manually and powering off gear to know that I don't care for it if I don't have to anymore.
delfinom 1y ago
Ill assure you the amount of Linux bros that bought it was probably already small. Most buyers of preconfigured solutions are buying it because it's a preconfigured solutions with no need for a computer science degree.
ArchD 1y ago
RPIs have no ECC RAM. Without ECC RAM you can get bitrot in your RAID/ZFS much more easily.
- _joel 1y ago
  https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/ https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...
  - ArchD 1y ago
    This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data corruption. Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption. So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.
    - _joel 1y ago
      Don't take my word, here's Matt Ahrens, a, ZFS developer. It's not required but a good idea. "There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag(zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error. I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."
ddtaylor 1y ago
Pis are actually pretty terrible at running a NAS. Sure there are people who do it and create content about it (Jeff Geerling) and that's kind of the schtick - it's quirky and weird and has some sharp edges. Great for making content or going down rabbit holes, not so great for actually running a high availability system that just works with minimal fussing. There are a ton of very capable x86 systems that are small and accomplish the task at great power and noise levels.

deelowe 1y ago

Can a pi achieve the same iops? I'd be highly suspecious of any such claims.

dangus 1y ago
500MB/s NVMe via the M.2 hat. It doesn't even have to be a Pi though, just look at competing NAS solutions that have hit the market since Synology peaked in popularity. Why am I spending more on a Synology versus something like a UGREEN NAS and just flashing a wide selection of NAS/home cloud operating systems on it? Synology's customer base certainly has the technical know-how to accomplish that.
- tzs 1y ago
  Oh wow...I'm surprised at 500 MB/s NVMe. I've got an RPi 4 with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME SSD in an external USB-C enclosure connected to one of the Pi's USB 3.0 ports, and get 280 MB/s. I would have expected going to an RPi 4 with an NVME SSD not going through USB to do a lot more than just boost storage speed by 80%. I had been thinking of getting an RPi 5 and moving my RPi 4 stuff to the 5, freeing the 4 to replace the 3 that is current running Home Assistant, but for what I'm doing on the 4 I'm no longer sure the 5 would actually give much noticeable performance improvement. It may be better to simply get another 4 to replace the 3.
  - dangus 1y ago
    I guess this is a side note personally don’t think any of the Raspberry Pi hardware is worth it unless you are using the GPIO pins or any of those not-NAS not-PC type of functionality the Pi offers. I think for general compute it’s hard to make it make sense. I think there are a whole lot of mini PC type of solutions that just make more overall sense.
pdimitar 1y ago
I don't know why people love Pi-s so much. They filled a niche, once, years ago, and were quickly outcompeted not even a year and a half after. Get some old i7 or Ryzen, get a big case, put 12-18 HDDs, spend a little extra on quality cooling solution if you have the server in your bedroom / living room, install modern Linux, tinker to your heart's content.
- oakesm9 1y ago
  For homelabs, yer you can get something much better for much less. For use cases where consistency and future support is key (education and industry) you really can't beat a Raspberry Pi. Their hardware and software support is top class. The first Raspberry Pi is still supported by the latest version of their OS over a decade later and it's even still being manufactured. For all their products they commit to long term availability. For example, the Pi 5 will be in active production until at least January 2036 (assuming the company itself exists of course). For anyone with a fleet of these, that's an amazing commitment. It means that when a piece of hardware breaks you can buy a band new but identical piece of hardware to replace it. For most other companies you'd need to buy a different piece of hardware. Yes, the specs would be better, but now you have a fleet with mixed hardware which _you_ need to support and maintain going forwards.
  - pdimitar 1y ago
    Oh, I see. It's about fleets of easy-to-manage / predictable-to-support machines. That's valid, thanks for making me aware. And indeed I was wondering about homelabs. RPis were never good there, not even when they got out for the first time. The form factor is what won over people back then. Feature- and speed-wise they were always mostly substandard. Not to mention Linux kernel support and driver issues (that might have been fixed since the last time I looked, admittedly). And I agree on the fleet thing. Best if you can flash an SD card, drive to the spot in meatspace, pluck away the broken RPi, plug the new one in, wait for boot, test, drive away. Heard people doing that with RPis and others.
- reactordev 1y ago
  Because for $40 I have a system that runs at a decent speed. For $300 I could get an ITX to run. So for the cost of an ITX, I could run a dozen RPIs. Who wants to have a server running in their bedroom? Have you heard the noise those things make? Sorry, no.
reactordev 1y ago
Around 200-270MiB/s is what has been publicly benched. I’m sure there’s someone squeezing 300 out of one. The PCIe bus in an RPI is Gen 2 so it’s not that fast. The point isn’t whether an RPI is a Synology device. The point is there are other ways of having a cheap NAS other than Synology. Hell, a Beelink with an external USB 3.0 HDD rack would also do just fine.
procaryote 1y ago
Do you need it to?

dangus 1y ago

Another way to put this is that Synology misjudged their customers' appetite for alternatives. The ease of use of the Synology solution was always a plus of the product, but Synology misjudged the values and abilities of its core customer. They also misjudged the rapidly maturing market of competitors (e.g., why am I buying a Synology instead of UGREEN?) Their core customer always had the ability to set up their own NAS in a more manual way, they just didn't really want to have to do that when an easier solution was available. This isn't a situation like iCloud where the whole purpose of the product is to provide a service that 99% of the customer base doesn't know how to do on their own. For a typical Synology customer, setting up their own TrueNAS box is something that probably only takes an hour including watching a YouTube setup tutorial. The person who is considering a Synology solution in the first place tends to be highly technical to begin with.

throwaway173738 1y ago
I can confirm that I bought a Synology NAS because I didn’t want to tinker with the backup system for my family’s data. And when I read about the drive requirements for a new Synology NAS I decided that tinkering might not be such a bad thing. They really screwed up.
- caconym_ 1y ago
  Same. I like my Synology unit well enough but I see a trend toward less openness, toward greed (including removing capabilities from units they've already sold) and toward a decline of their business as a result of tanking customer goodwill. So they no longer seem like a reliable bet for the long term, which is what I'm looking for in a NAS.
sumtechguy 1y ago
That is exactly where I am. The value prop on synology has fallen off. Esp since they have let their kernel rot. There are tons of perf they are leaving on the table. The default external ports are usually 1g and most others have moved to at least 2.5g. I just wanted something I just didnt have to mess with a lot. And could pop in an external USB drive here and there. Other solutions will fill that need just fine too. Just didnt really want to fiddle with DIY.

mrob 1y ago

Which SoC boards have ECC ram? ECC ram is essential for any reliable data storage system. Disks have built-in error correcting codes, and RAID can detect errors, but none of this helps if the data is corrupted in RAM before it ever reaches the disk.

reactordev 1y ago
The RPI CM5…
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mrob 1y ago
  The specs claim "ECC" [0], but give no further details. ejolson on the Raspberry Pi forums [1] thinks it is on-die ECC, not traditional ECC, which would mean transfers between the RAM and the memory controller are not protected and there are no means of monitoring errors or triggering a kernel panic if there's an uncorrectable error. Some discussion on Reddit [2] also suggests it's on-die ECC. If this is true, it's better than nothing but still not a replacement for a NAS with traditional ECC RAM. [0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?variant=cm5-104032 https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-5/?varia... [1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296449 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2296449#p2296... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspberry_pi_cm5_ecc_memory_details/ https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1irryax/raspb...
  - reactordev 1y ago
    The chip is the memory controller… Yes it’s on-die. Yes it has error reporting. Don’t spread fud. There isn’t a dedicated chip because there doesn’t need to be. Broadcom BCM2712
    - mrob 1y ago
      In that case I incorrectly thought (like the other forum posters) it was like DDR5 on-die ECC. What you describe is better than DD5 on-die ECC. Is this error reporting supported by Linux? Is there some way I can do fault injection (e.g. undervolting the RAM) to check it's working?

izacus 1y ago

This is just another version of "why Dropbox when rsync" and equally silly.

reactordev 1y ago
What is silly about building your own? Explain? If rsync works for you, why would you buy Dropbox? “Why Lamborghini when Honda” is equally as silly yet I’ve seen them race head to head. Honda won.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  I don't agree with the grandparent comment... I don't think it's silly. But building your own doesn't scale to all the things. For everybody who wants to build their own X, the same person doesn't also want to build their Y and Z. They will eventually need to buy some products. So there will generally always be a market for pre-packaged solutions. For example: someone building an app may need network storage. They may not also want to block the building of the app on the building of the network storage.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    In which case enjoy your Synology DRM and don’t complain that an RPi or ITX DIY build isn’t comparable…
- wat10000 1y ago
  There's nothing silly about building your own. What's silly is declaring a convenient, user-friendly product to be pointless because it's possible for a skilled person with a lot of free time to build their own. If you want to build your own Dropbox with rsync, go wild, have fun, we'd all love to see what you come up with. But I don't have time for that. My family doesn't have the skills for that. Dropbox is great for us, and building our own is not a realistic alternative.
dgacmu 1y ago
It really isn't, though. 1) there exist viable commercial competitors providing approximately equivalent functionality 2) the roll your own solution with, e.g., TrueNAS, also provides equivalent functionality and is about 90% as easy. I say this as someone who owns and manages three Synology boxes and one more recent TrueNAS box. There was a time when Synology offered something quite better than the alternatives, but that time is no longer. My newest one (192TB) I bought the hardware pre-assembled and tested from a VAR, installed TrueNAS, and was off to the races. It cost more than buying the individual components would have, but it had zero headache and was cheaper than buying the equivalent amount of storage from Synology.

pbronez 1y ago

Ubiquiti smelled the blood in the water and released a whole new NAS product line. They don’t run arbitrary apps but for basic storage on the network they look pretty solid.

sylens 1y ago
I have a DS923+ and it's been great as a combo storage device and low-powered Docker host for homelab stuff. But if I had to replace it, I would break it apart into pure storage (like the Ubiquiti device) and a mini PC to run as a server.

nottorp 1y ago

For one rPIs are severely i/o limited still. May be fine with one ssd. For two, if you like power adapters going into boxes out of which usb cables to go more external hard drives, a Pi may be fine. If you want one neat box to tuck somewhere and forget about it, they aren't. But then people buy Intel "NUCs" where the power adapter is larger than the computer box... And three, the latest Pis have started to require active cooling. Might as well go low power x86 then.

reactordev 1y ago
My point is there are alternatives, like you said.
- Arainach 1y ago
  The alternative to a Synology NAS isn't RPi. There are plenty of alternatives - QNAP, UGreen, a tower running TrueNAS - but a messy pile of overpriced unreliable SoCs attached to SATA hats isn't an alternative for a single device with multiple hard drive bays, consistent power and cooling, and easy management.
  - reactordev 1y ago
    The alternative is anything not Synology that can do NAS with SATA SSD or NVMe storage. That’s it. Anything more than that is in a class of enterprise servers that deserve its own discussion over a simple DS1522+
    - Arainach 1y ago
      This is nonsense. Both a horse and a pickup truck can be used to pull a wagon, but no one seriously considers one an alternative to the other. What you are describing is a hobby item for enthusiasts who want to enjoy tinkering, setting something crazy up and constantly debugging it. That is very much NOT the market of people who buy Synology products. Synology is not a JBOD RAID. It is an appliance that does many things (storage, services, web access, etc.) and can automatically keep itself up to date with no additional contact necessary. It can be hooked up to a UPS for resilience. If you have a problem there are support forums and online articles. It can be synced to other Synology devices at other sites. Etc., etc. A pile of RPi is none of that.

ekianjo 1y ago

you dont even Pi and sata shields, just buy a SOC that has direct M2 ports...

j45 1y ago

Storage should be a home appliance, not critical stuff to maintain and manage. The ability to hot swap a drive when it needs replacement without a disruption to one's life is what a NAS is for.

ryandrake 1y ago
I feel like hot swap is great if you work in a datacenter, but in order to be a useful benefit in a home setting, you have to have new, replacement hard drives sitting around on a shelf somewhere. My RAID alarm went off about a year ago warning me that a drive was failing, and I had to place an order and wait a week. Plus, the amount of time it took for the HW RAID controller to rebuild the new drive, I probably could have restored from a full backup.
- j45 1y ago
  I don't need my data offline when it doesn't have to be. You don't need extra drives sitting around. When one fails, you buy one, Amazon can have it over in a day, or local shops. If it's not realistic for that, having one spare isn't a bad thing. If you replace with a larger capacity drive, the existing raid only uses the same size to keep the raid. Depending on the drives you are using, SMR technology can take much much longer to rebuild a raid than CMR. Self-storage should be like a cloud - people need to rely on it like a cloud provider. Hot swap is a negligible cost over the 5-10 years you keep a NAS. Hot swap chassis whether it's one you buy or a Synology/QNAP, etc is the way to go. Hot swap used to cost a ton, it's considerably come down market. Storage is like a home appliance for me, just because I could build a stove doesn't mean I should. I've spent enough time swapping hard drives manually and powering off gear to know that I don't care for it if I don't have to anymore.

delfinom 1y ago

Ill assure you the amount of Linux bros that bought it was probably already small. Most buyers of preconfigured solutions are buying it because it's a preconfigured solutions with no need for a computer science degree.

ArchD 1y ago

RPIs have no ECC RAM. Without ECC RAM you can get bitrot in your RAID/ZFS much more easily.

_joel 1y ago
https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-your-data/ https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-y...
- ArchD 1y ago
  This article is only saying that ZFS can mitigate disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, mainly through using checksums, not that it can completely prevent disk data corruption. Also, it does not talk about the scenario where the in-RAM data being corrupted does not come with checksum. For example, data received from the network by the NFS/SMB server to be written to a file, before it gets passed to ZFS. This data is stored somewhere in RAM by the NFS/SMB server without any checksum before it gets passed on to ZFS. ZFS does not do any work here to detect or repair the corruption. So, ZFS does not prevent on-disk data corruption caused by bad RAM, and only mitigates it. Using ECC RAM results in a huge relative reduction of such corruption, even though some people may consider the non-ECC probability to be already low enough.
  - _joel 1y ago
    Don't take my word, here's Matt Ahrens, a, ZFS developer. It's not required but a good idea. "There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag(zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error. I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS."

ddtaylor 1y ago

Pis are actually pretty terrible at running a NAS. Sure there are people who do it and create content about it (Jeff Geerling) and that's kind of the schtick - it's quirky and weird and has some sharp edges. Great for making content or going down rabbit holes, not so great for actually running a high availability system that just works with minimal fussing. There are a ton of very capable x86 systems that are small and accomplish the task at great power and noise levels.