Re:Don’t Be Afraid of RAID
by vetinari on Sunday May 24, 2020 @05:14PM
(#23294871)
While I love my Synology too, but let's not paint too rose picture:
- They are not expensive; you are getting a bunch of software on top. Not everything is based on open source, there's lot of Synology own developed software (and services, like quickconnect) too.
- SHR and SHR2 are build on top of bog-standard mdraid. You can mount them in standard linux machine, you you ever need it.
- You have option of btrfs and ext4. On cheaper models, only ext4. Btrfs is running on top of mdraid, not in btrfs raid mode.
- I had a drive failure; it beeped at me, exactly as you described, but after swapping the drive, I had to run rebuild from the web UI. It didn't start rebuilding automatically.
- App store: some things are great - Synology Drive kicks Nextcloud's ass. The office, calendar, mail packages are very nice. Synology DNS is Bind and Synology Directory Server is Samba in AD mode. with some options disabled (you can't join AD domain as another domain controller; only one can exist). What's worse, many open-source packages are available in old versions, as if someone packaged it once, threw over the wall and they are seldomly updated. And you won't be able to install postgres, because DSM (the Synology system) uses one internally, ancient version at that (9.3.22 on my system). That's why so many use Docker (on models capable of running it. Not all models can do that!). Similarly to that, you are probably running an ancient kernel. Wireguard? Forget it.
- You don't need public IP or play with port forwarding (even though it is better to have public IP/port forward): you can use Synology quickconnect, which will either hole punch your NAT for you, or do forwarding for you. You can share your files with Drive, even if you are behind CG-NAT.
- They are not expensive; you are getting a bunch of software on top. Not everything is based on open source, there's lot of Synology own developed software (and services, like quickconnect) too.
- SHR and SHR2 are build on top of bog-standard mdraid. You can mount them in standard linux machine, you you ever need it.
- You have option of btrfs and ext4. On cheaper models, only ext4. Btrfs is running on top of mdraid, not in btrfs raid mode.
- I had a drive failure; it beeped at me, exactly as you described, but after swapping the drive, I had to run rebuild from the web UI. It didn't start rebuilding automatically.
- App store: some things are great - Synology Drive kicks Nextcloud's ass. The office, calendar, mail packages are very nice. Synology DNS is Bind and Synology Directory Server is Samba in AD mode. with some options disabled (you can't join AD domain as another domain controller; only one can exist). What's worse, many open-source packages are available in old versions, as if someone packaged it once, threw over the wall and they are seldomly updated. And you won't be able to install postgres, because DSM (the Synology system) uses one internally, ancient version at that (9.3.22 on my system). That's why so many use Docker (on models capable of running it. Not all models can do that!). Similarly to that, you are probably running an ancient kernel. Wireguard? Forget it.
- You don't need public IP or play with port forwarding (even though it is better to have public IP/port forward): you can use Synology quickconnect, which will either hole punch your NAT for you, or do forwarding for you. You can share your files with Drive, even if you are behind CG-NAT.
So is it perfect? No. But it is very nice.