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Synology NAS or DIY?
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Synology NAS or DIY?

randvegetarandvegeta Member, Host Rep

Anyone have much experience with Synology NAS products?

https://www.synology.com/en-us/products

I've got a couple of the more 'entry level' versions of these devices, mainly as a nice and simple box to use for simple storage over my home and office networks. I've generally been very happy with them. Solid and reliable little boxes. I have them configured in RAID 5 for maximal storage with basic redundancy.

But as you can probably guess, the lowend entry level stuff doesn't find it's way into production use in the DC (at least not for anything serious). But they have a number of rack-mounted NAS solutions that look quite interesting, with plenty of hotswap bays, dual redundant PSUs, high-availability clustering, 10G NICs, etc. Specifically targeting 'Enterprise' applications. On paper it looks good. But then comes the price.

The RS4017xs+ has 16 drive bays, runs on an Intel Xeon D-1541 (8 core CPU) and 8GB DDR4 RAM. The price? A little over US$5,000.

The hardware is by no means impressive for that kind of price, and I'm wondering if the software/management facilities that come with this device is really worth the premium. Anyone use one of these or similar in production?

From a purely hardware perspective, I figure such a server would cost around $1,000 or so. Presumably there are decent software NAS management 'panels' that can offer what Synology offers.

At first glance, it looks like there is a roughly $4,000 premium, basically for Synology software. Or am I missing something?

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Comments

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    inb4 ten people post "I use Synology and home and it works great".

    I can comment knowledgeably on their consumer products, and sounds like you're familiar with them, too. This is their enterprise line which is different.

    Will be interested to read reviews though :-)

  • randvegetarandvegeta Member, Host Rep

    Yes I use it both at home and at the office (actually it's in the Data Center, but it's not used for anything serious) and the consumer stuff is great. So yes, I am explicitly looking to see what people think about the 'Enterprise' stuff, and weather or not it's worth it.

    Looks good, but costly. Bare in mind, anyone using it for serious enterprise stuff would need at least 2, for high avaliability. So that $5,000 unit, is actually more like $10,000, and that's before you include the HDDs, which could easily add another $4,000.

  • DamianDamian Member
    edited October 2017

    I've used a few of the rackmount 'enterprise' units and was not particularly impressed. It's the same basic DSM you get with a home unit, with just a few extra features like clustering.

    I'd recommend rolling your own. I don't know how long you've been using Synology devices but if you remember the nearly continuous onslaught of vulnerabilities in the old 4.x version of DSM, it doesn't set a good precedence for a positive security mindset, although newer versions seem to be built with this in mind. Building your own will ensure a smaller attack surface due to fewer unexpected or unknown services running.

    For what it's worth, four 2-bay units will fit in 4 U of rack space and the rubber feet do a good job of isolating them from rack vibrations:

  • randvegetarandvegeta Member, Host Rep

    Damian said: For what it's worth, four 2-bay units will fit in 4 U of rack space and the rubber feet do a good job of isolating them from rack vibrations:

    I have a couple of the DS1513+ models. They are HA capable, but I'm not sure how comfortable I would be putting them in proper production. They've been solid since I got them and they've never gone down (without me taking them down that is).

    As for the security, I've not had much issue since they are not accessible over the internet. They have access TO the internet via NAT, but they are not directly accessible. So this was never an issue.

  • LeeLee Veteran
    edited October 2017

    raindog308 said: inb4 ten people post "I use Synology and home and it works great".

    I use Synology at home and it does not work that great.

    Thanked by 1raindog308
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Lee said: I use Synology at home and it does not work that great.

    I have a pair of DS215j that have been great for TimeMachine and media serving.

    The main benefit of Synology is that you get a low-power machine pre-engineered, instead of firing up some giant 800w FreeNAS monster.

  • WSSWSS Member

    Oh god. On a spec job I did for some side cash, I got to work with a DS21x that someone tried to upgrade in place and the user mapping and drive mounts got all fucked up before I was called.

    I can't remember specifically what I did anymore, but it pretty much ended up being reloading, restoring the old user perms, and fixing two mangled ACLs.

    I think I'd rather have a Raspbian setup hot-glued to the top of a 10 year old HGST drive running off a power supply from an old WRT (also serving the router) than deal with them (by choice).

    The fact that they've had like 40 DSM issues in the last couple years does not endure them to me in the slightest.

  • LeeLee Veteran

    raindog308 said: I have a pair of DS215j that have been great for TimeMachine and media serving.

    The main benefit of Synology is that you get a low-power machine pre-engineered, instead of firing up some giant 800w FreeNAS monster.

    It's the DS215J I have, kids complain its shit for media at home and remotely. In the process of trying to set up a remote Plex server for them. They are in various EU locations studying. One is in Switzerland so yeah not the best trying to access a home server in Scotland.

  • I think I made the right choice with Synology saving some money from DIY as far I was looking for a backup system.

  • pbgbenpbgben Member, Host Rep

    I run Xpenology DSM v6 on a dell R610 via USB at Online.net and it works OK

  • @raindog308 said:
    The main benefit of Synology is that you get a low-power machine pre-engineered, instead of firing up some giant 800w FreeNAS monster.

    My home FreeNAS monster is only 430 W. ;)

    Couldn't give an exact cost anymore since I've upgraded parts and replaced drives over the years, but initially it was less than $1000.

    (Before FreeNAS I had a 2-disk D-Link appliance box.. man was that thing slow, and didn't monitor SMART status properly, but certainly used less than 430 W.)

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited October 2017

    I am a firm believer in DIY (or hack'em'up when i get my hands on something proprietary which people throw away as no longer working, usually).
    Disclaimers aside, the advantages of making your own rig are enormous:
    1. You know what you put in there and don't depend on some supplier's deals and/or bribes to get some discount in the right time to shove his subpar stuff up the throat of your manufacturer;
    2. You should be able to calculate it for your needs more exactly than the stepping a manufacturer or another offers;
    3. You can upgrade it as you wish, change OS as you wish (in this case at least->storage) allocate permissions exactly as you wish, i.e. no extra accounts for "assistance", "upgrade", whatever they think they need to put in so the hackers know what to exploit when word gets out, nobody gets any "telemetry" (well, when you really build your system up from scratch and use OSS basic tools, anyway);
    4. Generic MBs and OSes do not need proprietary encryption schemes, raid parities taken out someone's ass or any other "commercial secrets" so you can easily migrate, upgrade, rebuild without worry that some part might not be "genuine", "certified" and as such rejected by the software or hardware so you will better fork hundreds for the "approved" or "original" parts just to be reasonably sure they will work;
    5. Features you dont need that cost hundreds, such as low noise (and possibly lowered performance that comes with it usually) for a server you keep in the basement or attic are not added up to the cost, nor are degrading the performance of the raw machine, also, no extra sensors that can malfunction and are either show stoppers that require you to service the unit in an "authorized" place, of course, or can be disabled, but this will void your warranty costing more money when the unit will actually malfunction and needs to be repaired;
    6. In case of severe malfunction you know you will do your best to recover the data, not depend on the good will of an overworked employee which will decide it is definitely faster to wipe everything clean and upgrade to the latest and greatest "firmware" as this will probably fix whatever was wrong with it anyway, fully aware the warranty never guarantees any data integrity;
    .
    .
    .
    .
    I could go on forever but people always complain about my walls of text and, usually, these things are pretty known in the community, we all had to bang our heads at times against some proprietary hardware, not to mention software.

    So, caveat emptor, nobody knows better than yourself what you really need in which quantity and with what features.

  • pbgben said: I run Xpenology DSM v6 on a dell R610 via USB at Online.net and it works OK

    Do you have any issues with upgrading that on an ongoing basis? I keep looking at what Xpenology does but fearful that an upgrade would kill my installation and require a bunch of time to get working again.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    JustAMacUser said: My home FreeNAS monster is only 430 W. ;)

    The DS215J is 13.4w when running all-out, and 5.3 watts when hibernating :-)

    Lee said: It's the DS215J I have, kids complain its shit for media at home and remotely.

    As usual, it all depends. I have two...one is purely backup and the other is purely media. I don't get complaints about media, but it's streaming pre-converted mp4s to a Roku over gigabit LAN, and 90% of the time only one stream. I do use WD Black on them.

    I probably wouldn't try converting on the fly or anything like that...it's only got a dual core 800Mhz Marvell with 512MB of RAM.

    Maounique said: bribes

    Maounique said: shove his subpar stuff up the throat

    Maounique said: raid parities taken out someone's ass or any other "commercial secrets"

    Maounique said: Features you dont need that cost hundreds, such as low noise

    Maounique said: overworked employee which will decide it is definitely faster to wipe everything clean

    Dude, not everyone in the world is out to rape you. For pity's sake.

    And I do need low noise :-)

    Yes, there's a tradeoff. That's OK. 20 years ago, I had a 486 running OpenBSD serving as my home router...today I use OpenWRT in a Linksys. A lot more freedom with that old OpenBSD box, but it was big, loud, chewed power, and ultimately I didn't need the extra flexibility. To date, nothing has been shoved down my throat, I have paid no bribes, and my rectal chastity is intact.

    Thanked by 1WSS
  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited October 2017

    raindog308 said: nothing has been shoved down my throat, I have paid no bribes

    TL;DR case, I meant the manufacturer's contracting in China, nothing about end user.

    raindog308 said: and my rectal chastity is intact

    Same thing, it was about proprietary parity schemes which usually dont reinvent the wheel, just say it is time to make it square in order to grab a "patent pending" and be incompatible with anything else.

    raindog308 said: Maounique said: overworked employee which will decide it is definitely faster to wipe everything clean

    So you don't think that is the case in many places...

    My NAS is running proxmox over debian on an E350 brazos ASUS board passively cooled and also runs my mail server in a VM in a total of 4 GB of RAM and 4 drives, using at most 35 Watt in full load, usually 15 or so when almost idle. All components are second hand, it costed some 300 Lei, which are about 4.5 to 1 Eur. Including my time to build and install it, testing etc, it is about 100 Eur for 3 TB of storage in raid 5. The price of a cheap external drive.

  • @raindog308 said:
    The DS215J is 13.4w when running all-out, and 5.3 watts when hibernating :-)

    Can't beat that. I won't even mention how mine affects my electric bill.

    To date, nothing has been shoved down my throat, I have paid no bribes, and my rectal chastity is intact.

    I know this comment was addressed to @Maounique, but I woke up this morning wondering if @raindog308's rectal chastity was still intact, so thanks for sharing that.

    /s TMI

    Thanked by 1raindog308
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    JustAMacUser said: I woke up this morning wondering if @raindog308's rectal chastity was still intact, so thanks for sharing that.

    I could spin up an Observium endpoint and have alerts sent to your phone.

    Thanked by 2Maounique Squyd
  • I think I'll manage without, but I really appreciate the offer.

    Thanked by 1raindog308
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    JustAMacUser said: I think I'll manage without, but I really appreciate the offer.

    Sure thing. As a Mac user, I know you Sphinct Different.

  • LeeLee Veteran
    edited October 2017

    Any recommendations for a NAS that can handle Plex transcoding of say 2 streams simultaneously (mostly 720 + 1080) to mobile devices Ipad and phones. The DS215J is just not that great for it.

  • @Lee,

    I think Synology does have some 2- and 4-disk NAS boxes that support hardware accelerated encoding in their CPUs.

    My DIY NAS can handle two streams much of the time* and it's only an i3, if that helps.

    *Plex kinda sucks on FreeBSD because it doesn't leverage hardware encoding; the i3 has Intel's Quick Sync and it does make a difference as my 2012 Mac Mini uses it and doesn't break a sweat.

    Thanked by 1Lee
  • LeeLee Veteran

    I was looking at possibly stepping up to this.

    https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS218+

    Or even this

    https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS718+

  • LeeLee Veteran

    Too many steps...

  • How about diy with xpenology?

  • pbgbenpbgben Member, Host Rep

    @Damian said:

    pbgben said: I run Xpenology DSM v6 on a dell R610 via USB at Online.net and it works OK

    Do you have any issues with upgrading that on an ongoing basis? I keep looking at what Xpenology does but fearful that an upgrade would kill my installation and require a bunch of time to get working again.

    Yeh, I dont upgrade it, it will likely fail.

  • @Lee said:
    Any recommendations for a NAS that can handle Plex transcoding of say 2 streams simultaneously (mostly 720 + 1080) to mobile devices Ipad and phones. The DS215J is just not that great for it.

    Build your own. An Intel g4560 is a good start for your project.

    Thanked by 1vimalware
  • LeeLee Veteran

    Baris said: Build your own.

    Yeah, it's an option but not one I want to be honest.

  • alegeekalegeek Member
    edited October 2017

    I went the DIY route as I wanted my NAS to be a plex server for a large family, I tried unRAID and FreeNAS among other setups but have finally settled on ubuntu + snapraid + mergerfs.

    I liked the flexibility of unRAID and being able to use different sized drives, I found that FreeNAS didn't play well with Ryzen. I found the write speeds of unRAID sucked though, I get 140MB/s with mergerFS, I do the odd manual run of snapraid but have a cronjob to keep the parity sync'd up.

    My setup is:

    1 x 1700 Ryzen

    16GB DDR4 RAM

    Asus Prime X370-Pro motherboard

    4 x 3TB WD Red Drives

    1 x 512GB Samsung Pro 840

    It runs Plex, Sabnzbd, Sonarr, Radarr, TVHeadend dockers on top of ubuntu 16.04. The setup cost me about £800, but when I think how much I'm saving by cutting the cord it's more than worth it :)

    Overkill for some but for my needs it's just right and I love working with dockers :)

  • Damian said: I've used a few of the rackmount 'enterprise' units and was not particularly impressed. It's the same basic DSM you get with a home unit, with just a few extra features like clustering.

    Very similar result as well for me. More issues than use, same as on Netapp and Dell/EMC.

    They do "enterprise" things like iSCSI but i see no reason to go over DYI - EMC/Dell/Netapp offer high-end support contracts which is the sole existence justification, Synology does this only very half assed.

    Lee said: Any recommendations for a NAS that can handle Plex transcoding of say 2 streams simultaneously (mostly 720 + 1080) to mobile devices Ipad and phones. The DS215J is just not that great for it.

    A Skylake/Kaby Lake Celeron might work fine, but you should go the i3 (8th gen only) or i5/i7/E3 (7 and older) to be safe. We do a bunch of streams 24/7 on an i7-4770k, mostly 1080p/720p to 720p for Chromecast and browser (thus both HLS).

    Not using Plex however.

    alegeek said: 1 x 1700 Ryzen

    Also good choice, but pair with ECC. Sadly unbuffered ECC is expensive.

    Thanked by 1Lee
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