View Single Post
turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2022-07-21, 20:55

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad View Post
Excellent! Then maybe you can help answer some of my questions about Synology that aren't easily found in their marketing materials.

Two main features I would use if I build my own NAS are 1) mirror or full parity across multiple drives and 2) the ability to add larger drives, migrate data off of the smaller ones, and remove the smaller ones to free up slots for future larger drives. The former to protect against hardware failures and bit rot which is actually what happened to the first of my two drives; it has a couple of catastrophically bad sectors that are impossible to read now no matter what tools I use (the drive physically stops responding). The latter to facilitate easier expansion over time. So, I'd want a PC or a NAS with at least 3 or 4 drive bays, though probably only two bays would be occupied most of the time.

It looks like SHR would fit the bill for at least the first case. How well does it copy or rebalance when adding new drives and removing old ones? From what I can tell, Synology doesn't support ZFS, which itself isn't a deal breaker, but I know ZFS has commands to add/remove devices and copy/rebalance data pretty seamlessly.

Also, since ZFS checksums everything, when it periodically scrubs to verify its checksums, it can use the parity data to automatically fix most damage. Do you know if SHR has any similar automatic data loss detection and recovery process?
So the short version of the long answer is SHR does all the thinking for you. It will alert you if there is an issue (assuming you configure alerting methods) and let you know if a volume is in trouble. If you want to replace a drive, for data capacity reasons or failure, just pull the drive and replace it. You will be walked through initializing the drive and then it will rebuild. You will be good to go, as long as you don't lose another drive during that process. If you want to expand the volume and have an open bay, just add a drive to the NAS. It has some basic steps to initialize it and then rebuild and increase capacity.

Quote:
My most critical documents are periodically archived and encrypted using borg and synced to Google Drive with rclone. I have 1TB of free storage in Google Drive since I have Google Fiber, and I'm using about 185 GB for my encrypted archive, but ideally I'd commit several TB in a proper 3-2-1 strategy. Going forward I'm thinking about getting a Backblaze account and shoving everything in the cloud and not relying on Google's infra.
I should encrypt and then store the encrypted package, but I'm not there yet. It just isn't worth the effort to me and I'm "trusting" Apple to keep it safe. I do however retain a copy on my NAS as part of my normal replication process. I also used Synology Drive which is a private version of Dropbox but stored on your NAS. You can even share public links to files hosted in Synology Drive.

Quote:
I hear you. Really, I do! But some of the best software out there is "custom-rolled community junk"! Every wifi router I've owned for at least the last decade has gotten upgraded with custom firmware because the stock firmware was slow, anemic, and late (if ever!) to get security patches. I figure these NASes are all just running Linux with a bunch of open-source tools anyway with a shiny branded UI on top. So, why not go straight to the source and trim the fat?

That's my first line of thinking, of course. Yes, buying a prefab appliance means a much lower investment in setup time and maybe some kind of official support channel if things go wrong. I don't relish the idea of maintaining vdevs and zpools and all that stuff. It'd be fun to learn, but I don't want to spend more time troubleshooting than I have to. But I also don't want to drop a bunch of cash on an appliance only to be gobsmacked with buyer's remorse, realizing I could have done it better myself. I really do want to hear your experiences with Synology to teach me what I probably need to know.

As for tinkering, I don't mean that I'd be tinkering on it as a live system. Even if I go with TrueNAS, I'd be running through its setup process in a VM and getting comfortable there long before installing it on my "production" hardware.


Ah, good! You've preempted another one of my questions about Synology devices. Now that I'm looking that up on their site, I'm glad to see that virtualization and Docker in particular are headline features, but I'm a little concerned that they're only available on certain models. I'll have to be very careful choosing one because the ~$370 DS418 I was originally looking at doesn't appear to support virtualization, but the nearly identical ~$500 DS420+ does. Weird.
This has a lot more to do with the CPU used vs other specs. My + is capable of running docker containers. In fact my TT-RSS feed reader is running on my NAS in docker. So is my primary Homebridge instance. I even had a WordPress blog running there for a little bit. Very capable though the CPU is only so much. I put most on a purpose ESXi host that the ANMC server is running on.

Quote:
In my on-again, off-again research (I've been quietly reading about this stuff for months), I came across a lot more horror stories involving btrfs than ZFS. I read about how Red Hat abandoned it a few years ago because maintaining it was a huge pain, and it supposedly has had several serious (but arguably edge-case) bugs, and that all gives me pause. Do you use btrfs? On what kind of scale/load?
I've NEVER had issues related to the file system. I don't recall when Synology moved to btrfs but I've been on it from the time either I've has a NAS or it was part of the DSM package. I've had drives (begin to) fail but never a failure of the file system itself. One volume is ~38TB and the other is ~16TB. No issues at all with them. I even host the ANMC Maps on these NAS's so the inode management can handle thousands of tiny files just fine. The NAS also holds my family media. I have a large family and we have many different drives streaming (via Plex) from the NAS stored media.

If you were to ask me what you should get, based of off what I know of you then this is what I would recommend: No lower than the "Value series" and a minimum of 4 bay. These are the ones without the "j" or "+". If you want to be able to do more, then I would really recommend a "+" with same minimum of 4 bays. Mine has six and I'm feeling cramped. Go diskless and shuck drives. Ideally you would use NAS rated drives, but the cheapest large externals being shucked have always served me well. No need for "red" drives when most externals are "black" and flawless anyway.

If you have other questions about Synology or how their tech works day to day feel free to ask. I use mine for many many wonderful things!

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
  quote