Posted by motiejus 1 day ago
I’ve used (and still use) UnRaid before but switched to Synology for my data a while back due to both the plug-and-play nature of their systems (it’s been rock solid for me) and easily accessible hard drive trays.
I’ve built 3 UnRaid servers and while I like the software, hardware was always an issue for me. I’d love a 12-bay-style Synology hardware device that I could install whatever I wanted on. I’m just not interested in having to halfway deconstruct a tower to get at 1 hard drive. Hotswap bays are all I want to deal with now.
If it were now, I'd probably look deeper into Asus, QNap or a DIY TrueNAS.
I have an unraid on a usb stick somewhere in my rack, but overtime it started feeling limited, and when they began changing their license structure I decided it was time to switch, though I run it on a Dell r720xd instead of one of their builds (my only complaint is the fan noise - i think 730 and up are better in this regard)
Proxmox was also on my short list for hypervisors if you dont want TrueNAS.
I don't need 100% of my bytes to be instantly available to me on my network. The most important stuff is already available. I can wait a day for arbitrary media to thaw out for use. Local caching and pre-loading of read-only blobs is an extremely obvious path for smoothing over remote storage.
Other advantages should be obvious. There are no limits to the scale of storage and unless you are a top 1% hoarder, the cost will almost certainly be more than amortized by the capex you would have otherwise spent on all that hardware.
20TB which u can keep in a 2-bay cute little nas will cost you $4k USD / year on S3 infrequent access tier in APAC (where I am). So "payback time" of local hardware is just 6 months vs S3 IA. That's before you pay for any data transfers.
For my use-case I'm OK with un-hedged risk and dollars staying in my pocket.
This is the same product.
> 20TB
I think we might be pushing the 1% case here.
Just because we can shove 20TB of data into a cute little nas does not mean we should.
For me, knowledge that the data will definitely be there is way more important than having "free" access to a large pool of bytes.
This is not the perspective of actors working on longer timescale. For a number is agencies, preserving some encrypted data is beneficial, because it will be possible to recover in N years, whether any classic improvements, bugs found in key generators, or advances in quantum.
Very few people here will be that interesting, but... worth keeping in mind.
Most modern, especially software companies, choose not to fix relatively small but critical problems, yet they actively employ sometimes hundreds of customer support yes-people whose job seems to be defusing customer complaints. Nothing is ever fixed anymore.
But 5% free is very low. You may want to use every single byte you feel you paid for, but allocation algorithms really break down when free space gets so low. Remember that there's not just a solid chunk of that 5% sitting around at the end of the space. That's added up over all the holes across the volume. At 20-25% free, you should already be looking at whether to get more disks and/or deciding what stuff you don't actually need to store on this volume. So a hard alarm at 5% is not unreasonable, though there should also be a way to set a soft alarm before then.
But 5% of a 5 TB volume is 250 GB, that's the size of my whole system disk! Probably not so understandable by the lay person.
Some filesystems do stake out a reservation but I don't think any claim one as large as 5% (not counting the effect of fixed-size reservations on very small volumes). Maybe they ought to, as a way of managing expectations better.
For people who used computers when the disks were a lot smaller, or who primarily deal in files much much smaller than the volumes they're stored on, the absolute size of a percentage reservation can seem quite large. And, in certain cases, for certain workloads, the absolute size may actually be more important than the relative size.
But most file systems are designed for general use and, across a variety of different workloads, spare capacity and the impact of (not) keeping it open is more about relative than absolute sizes. Besides fragmentation, there's also bookkeeping issues, like adding one more file to a directory cascading into a complete rearrangement of the internal data structures.
It was simple, it just worked, and I didn't have to think about it.
* TB SDDS - a multi-type phenomenon of Drobo units suddenly failing. There were three 'types' of SDDS I and a colleague discovered - "Type A" power management IC failures, "Type B" unexplainable lockups and catatonia, and "Type C" failed batteries. Type B units' SOCs have power and clock go in and nothing going out.
However...
Long long ago I worked for a major NAS vendor. We had customers with huge NAS farms [1] and extremely valuable data. We were, I imagine, very exposed from a reputation or even legal standpoint. Drive testing and certification was A Very Big Deal. Our test suites frequently found fatal firmware bugs, and we had to very closely track the fw versions in customer installations. From a purely technical viewpoint there's no way we wanted customers to bring their own drives.
[1] Some monster servers had tripple-digit GBs of storage, or even a TB! (#getoffmylawn)
Is there something with 6-8 drives slots on which i could install whatever OS i want ? Ideally with a small form factor. I don’t want to have a giant desktop again for my nas purposes.
All these NAS manufacturers a spending time developing their own OS, when TrueNAS is well established.
If it was a ZFS NAS, I could ZFS send to another system.
I want to get the historical data out to an open portable system.
The only parts of Synology I really like are some of their media apps are a very tidy package, I've previously written a compatible server using NodeJS that can use their apps so I think I'll have to pursue that idea further given the vastly superior consumer hardware options that exist for NAS.
If I could get that form factor, but with a custom NAS software solution, I’d be very interested.
Add in a Mikrotik CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIE [1] for high speed networking. Choose your own HBA.
0: https://www.sliger.com/products/rackmount/storage/cx3701/