2023 NAS Advice after Synology volume “crashed"

[gvidales]

I currently own a Synology DS1817+, it’s an 8-bay NAS from late 2016 with a not-so-powerful CPU. I use this mostly as “dumb” storage and pair it with a MacMini that acts as the brain (Plex, Home Assistant, etc.) I figured that by having the brains separate from the NAS, the disks in the NAS would stop spinning more often and reduce wear. I use the NAS with Synology “hybrid raid” with 2 disks parity. I started with 4tb drives, and have gradually replaced 5 of them for 10tb ones. I run parity consistency checks often, and extended smart tests on each drive every week. As soon as there is a single bad sector error or I/O error or anything I replace the drive immediately. All of this, FOR NOTHING. A few weeks ago my volume “crashed” (see link) and went into read only mode… Like… what’s the point of dual disk redundancy if the whole volume can just crash… Anyway. I had a good 3-2-1 backup for my important stuff and recovered everything that mattered, but I have now lost complete faith in my NAS and don’t feel like filling it up again. I need a new one but I am traumatized by this experience and don’t trust anything.

 

Options:

1. Giving synology another shot. I could buy the DS1823xs+ which is a $1,800 8-bay NAS.

• Pros: powerful CPU. I am familiar with all the Apps (Synology Photos, HyperBackup) and could easily migrate my albums, etc.
• Cons: Expensive. No GPU for Plex transcoding so i’d still need the mac. Would have to deal with warnings all the time because Synology doesn’t like it when you use non-Synology branded drives on this NAS. What if my volume “crashes” again… I have never seen this outside of synology.

2. Building something with Unraid

• Pros: much more powerful build for the same price. Easily upgradeable.
• Cons: would need a bigger case (I move a lot, this matters). The fact that Unraid runs from a USB drive just sounds finicky, USB drives break all the time. Would have to migrate all my photo albums, would need more drives to migrate data (since I couldn’t restore from synology hyperbackup)

3. FreeNAS. I have no clue.

 

What should I do? I just need something that is reliable… that I can trust to keep my data if I take good care of it for at least 10 years. 

[mMontana]

RAID is always sold as a "resolution" for reliability of the system. Cannot replace backup, but make data storage more resistent to hardware failure.

Fact not always understood is... that RAID increase complexity and dependancy from "other things than pure storage". You need more ram, computational power to run a software that makes your drives redundant.

 

Any software RAID will expose you to issues due to some errors of the devloper of firmwares, software, microcontrollers, chip designers...

Any hardware RAID solution will enclave you to buy only the certified devices for that solution, with the sword of "end of support" by the company who brand that solution, cutting completely off any kind of upgrade, migration an so out of "new solution into copy data".

And 10 years for a storage is enterprise-class tier, maybe even scientific-organization tier. So don't expect that few thousand dollars could let you achieve that lifespan.

 

Key point here seems... time for restore. You seem more convinced to Synology due to ease of reconstruction, buy you would love more the features of Unraid solution.

Consider that Synology "advise" drives for their hardware, but are sold from other companies. I hope you did not buy SMR 10tb drives for your setup, or that could be part of what lead to read-only filesystem.

 

 

 

 

[RONOTHAN##]

50 minutes ago, gvidales said:

FreeNAS. I have no clue.

First off, FreeNAS has been replaced with TrueNAS (Scale would be the one you'd want to use, though Core is the more direct replacement to FreeNAS), and pros and cons are mostly the same as UnRAID with a few main differences:

1. It's free.
2. You can run it off an internal SSD, though flash drives are still an option if you really want to (these can be setup in a RAID 1 though if you want to protect against death, plus the actual software config is stored on a file that can be easily restored if you have to reinstall the OS).
3. You use ZFS. This is both a pro and a con, as it's about as robust a file system as you can get, pretty good performance for HDD based arrays, and tons of documentation. Con because it's not very flexible. The way they handle expansion is weird, where storage pools are a collection of their own mini RAID arrays called "vDevs" that are responsible for their own redundancy, then data is striped across the RAID arrays. The problem is each of these vDevs have some rules about how similar they can be to the others, the exact ones I'm a bit fuzzy on but I do know it's considered best practice to have them be the same drives, in the same amount, with the same amount of redundancy. Meaning that if you start out with 4 drives in a RAID Z1 (similar to RAID 5), you'd have to keep adding drives in groups of 4. 

Personally, if you can live with the expansion limitations, TrueNAS Scale is likely the better option for you, though if you do like the ability to upgrade drives one at a time you might be better off sticking with UnRAID or Synology, though at $1800 for the NAS it's really hard to recommend the Synology box if you're willing to learn a new interface and get better hardware. Also, just to mention that there are smaller 8 bay NAS enclosures you can buy if you want to, so you can probably get the size you want out of the Synology in a custom enclosure, you might just have to look around a bit. 

[MSMSMSM]

Synology is unfortunately known to do some really stupid shit, like making the disabling "advanced data integrity" by default (Seriously? What the fuck?)

 

 

And, IIRC, the default filesystem is EXT4, not Btrfs (which is more in the league of something like ZFS than say, NTFS). Yes, Btrfs has a write-hole bug for RAID5/6 configurations but Synology sets up the Btrfs volume over an LVM2 array, bypassing the problem altogether, though also, limiting the full extent to which Btrfs can be leveraged.

 

58 minutes ago, gvidales said:

Would have to deal with warnings all the time because Synology doesn’t like it when you use non-Synology branded drives

Synology doesn't sell their own drives, do you mean drives from their QVL? Because I have some Seagate IronWolf NAS drives and they work beautifully on my DS920+

 

---

 

The first comment is right, RAID is not a backup, only a means of uptime and it seems like you're treating RAID like that, so by that metric, the drive going read-only seems very much in line with what RAID is supposed to do, stay online.

 

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58 minutes ago, gvidales said:

FreeNAS. I have no clue

TrueNAS CORE is the successor to FreeNAS and TrueNAS SCALE is the Linux-based ZFS distribution from the creators of TrueNAS. If you want something with the ability of Diskstation OS (or just want to run Docker containers), then SCALE is the go-to pick. If you want it to remain dumb but reliable (not to imply SCALE is unreliable, it's just not something ixSystems recommends for enterprise deployments), then TrueNAS CORE is the choice you can make.

 

Though, like unRAID, TrueNAS will demand a larger chassis (I'd sell you by Jonsbo N1 if I could) and if you're concerned about USB drives, use an internal header, get one of these things from Amazon (see below), plug your USB device and tuck it in (if you're using unRAID, TrueNAS cautions against hosting the OS on a flash drive)

 

 

Also, ZFS is a memory-hog, so make sure you have a good budget cause you'll need a decent amount of memory.

[manikyath]

if you have the technical ability and spare time to set up your own NAS, synology is not the place to be.

 

i love them for what they are: a plug and play box that can be configured by someone with minimal IT knowledge on an afternoon.

 

as for tune unraid <> truenas thing... from the viewpoint of an unraid user: if you're wondering which one to get, get truenas. if you're not inheriting a horrid mix of different drives to make a way with, or making the system specificly for an SR-IOV workload.. unraid's not worth the rest of the oddities.

 

depending on your exact budget and preferences for the platform, there's a bunch of things you can do.

apparently quite recently asrock released a pair of new budget embedded cpu boards, that would make a nice platform for a NAS solution.. if not for them axing even more sata ports... so you have to calculate in a cheapskate HBA.

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/index.asp

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100M/index.asp

as for the format of the chassis.. that depends on your own willingness to get crafty.

[gvidales]

7 hours ago, mMontana said:

And 10 years for a storage is enterprise-class tier, maybe even scientific-organization tier. So don't expect that few thousand dollars could let you achieve that lifespan.

You are right, maybe I exaggerated. But at least I want something that can run for 6-7 years and that I can migrate easily to new hardware when the time comes. With synology at least I know I can replace drives one by one, and bring the full disk set to a new NAS.

 

7 hours ago, mMontana said:

Consider that Synology "advise" drives for their hardware, but are sold from other companies. I hope you did not buy SMR 10tb drives for your setup, or that could be part of what lead to read-only filesystem.

No I didn't buy SMR drives, I was cautious with that. I only have WD REDs. Synology now sells their own brand of drives, and if you buy into the new NAS models like the 1823xs+ you'll get a warning if you use any drive but theirs... Level One Techs did a good video about it recently. I guess the part I missed is that the volume went into read only mode and it started corrupting itself gradually as I started backing up my data.... After a couple days most of my folders were blank.

 

7 hours ago, MSMSMSM said:

Synology is unfortunately known to do some really stupid shit, like making the disabling "advanced data integrity" by default (Seriously? What the fuck?)

 

Yes... these and many other things. Luckily I had properly set up my volumes as Btrfs and data integrity enabled.

7 hours ago, MSMSMSM said:

Synology doesn't sell their own drives, do you mean drives from their QVL?

They do sell their own drives now... In the 1823xs+ you have to use those or you'll get a "warning" or "unverified" warning across all your drives. I heard they do this because a lot of people bought SMR drives or really cheap M.2 drives for cache and caused too many headaches to their customer service. I am super confused as to why, instead of improving their customer service, they preferred to make their products shittier or more limited. Way to go.

 

5 hours ago, manikyath said:

if you have the technical ability and spare time to set up your own NAS, synology is not the place to be.

 

I think I have the ability, and time spent on this is great as it's a hobby. I just don't know if I trust myself to set up the NAS properly and fill it with 40tb of valuable data, that if I have to make a change and rebuild volumes I wouldn't have anywhere to store it temporarily. 

 

Thanks a lot to all. You've given me a lot to think about. I WAS leaning towards synology because of their synology hybrid raid, which opens the door to upgrading drives one at a time and not have to replace all of them to get incremental space (vs a RAID6 array). HOWEVER, it seems they've also removed hybrid raid from the new model.... so now I am researching Unraid. I am just unclear on what will happen once I have 8x10tb drives and need to upgrade. Will I have to spend another $2K and somehow replace drives one by one? I'll keep researching.

[MSMSMSM]

1 hour ago, gvidales said:

Synology now sells their own brand of drives, and if you buy into the new NAS models like the 1823xs+ you'll get a warning if you use any drive but theirs... Level One Techs did a good video about it recently

Thanks for letting me know that, I'll keep that in mind when considering if I ever do business with Synology again.

 

On one hand, I understand, they're a consumer-facing brand and they want to go the "with the Synology NAS buy the Synology drives and Synology caching SSDs and maybe if you're a baller, the Synology network card and the Synology GPU" which is supposed to make the customer feel at ease and remove the anxiety that purchasers who may have the cash but not the technical knowledge have when they need to source their own parts (and also make some dollar, which I'm not against as long as you do it ethically)

 

But to someone like me, this feels very "razor and blades"y except the blades don't even subsidize the razor, and not like something I expect something from a brand that I give stacks of G's to. I want a QVL and I want you to give it the same treatment as you give your own drives. I trust Seagate to be there for me when the drives fail within their three year period, can Synology say the same? Probably not.

 

I'm sure for folks across the globe, you can do a s/Seagate/BrandNameHere/g and it'll remain true.

Disappointing but I guess I should've seen this coming. They did move some of their surveillance software from being license-by-hardware to license-by-subscription.

 

1 hour ago, gvidales said:

Yes... these and many other things. Luckily I had properly set up my volumes as Btrfs and data integrity enabled.

Here's to hoping my array doesn't suffer from the same fate as yours.

 

1 hour ago, gvidales said:

I guess the part I missed is that the volume went into read only mode and it started corrupting itself gradually as I started backing up my data.... After a couple days most of my folders were blank.

Then I guess the RAID didn't do its job in maintaining uptime, I'm sorry. I guess having a backup pays off

 

---

 

Small question, do you use a UPS? You seem to be well researched and probably do but I'm still curious what kinda UPS do you use, if you have one.

[gvidales]

2 hours ago, MSMSMSM said:

Small question, do you use a UPS? You seem to be well researched and probably do but I'm still curious what kinda UPS do you use, if you have one.

Until recently I had a 950VA APC UPS but it died 2 weeks ago (yes... i've been very lucky recently with my tech). I bought a very small one from an italian brand "Tecnoware" just to avoid not having any, but i'll buy a new APC one as soon as I find them where I live. I've connected it to the Synology and set it up so that the system shuts down after 10 seconds of power outage (not lower to avoid shutting it down on momentary voltage swings). I don't want the UPS for uptime, just to protect the NAS.

[mMontana]

I would not use NASes/raid storage without UPS.

I stopped used APC years ago, currently Legrand and Eaton are most used.

 

Also: I don't want to say nothing againsta btrfs, but I'd won't go on that filesystem as first choice. ZFS is really powerful, yet not that simple, and requires ram and computational power for unleash all its power and features.

I don't know if I'd go on EXT4 for 8 bay NAS, however this "lacking features" (as NAS os perspective) still is far more robust than btrfs.

 

Summarizing: for ganing the max from some toys (ZFS, btrfs) these must been deeply known, starding from... defects.

[MSMSMSM]

1 hour ago, mMontana said:

I stopped used APC years ago, currently Legrand and Eaton are most used.

Are there any reasons why not to use APC? I use APC because it was affordable, communicated over USB to the computer and had Linux support. Eaton was my first choice but... buying them requires me to go to distributors who take the utter piss, who themselves are available only on classified sites who, the moment you give them your phone number, expect the spam calls and scam texts to moon like some meme crypto that Elon shouts out when he needs to dump some coins.

 

1 hour ago, mMontana said:

I don't want to say nothing againsta btrfs, but I'd won't go on that filesystem as first choice

For a RAID5/RAID6, it's suicidal :3. The Arch Linux wiki is your friend... https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/btrfs. You'll need to go out of your way to do what Synology does and setup LVM2 and then layer your filesystem on top of that, effectively making RAID handled by the LVM2 instead of Btrfs, where the problems lie.

 

1 hour ago, mMontana said:

ZFS is really powerful, yet not that simple, and requires ram and computational power for unleash all its power and features

I'd say that TrueNAS's sane defaults are exactly that, sane defaults, unless you're using it in active workloads where every last bit of optimization matters, I'd wager they're fine as they are.

 

1 hour ago, mMontana said:

I don't know if I'd go on EXT4 for 8 bay NAS

I don't see the problem with it, EXT4 doesn't do volume management and RAID anyways, so the responsibility has to be picked up by something a layer below. Makes the lack of integrity/consistency checking a bit smaller pill to swallow as you'd have to use LVM2 anyways (which does have data integrity enforcement, though you do need to manually enable it).

 

But as someone who went that route out of morbid curiosity, do yourself a favour, use ZFS.

[mMontana]

11 hours ago, MSMSMSM said:

Are there any reasons why not to use APC? I use APC because it was affordable, communicated over USB to the computer and had Linux support. Eaton was my first choice but... buying them requires me to go to distributors who take the utter piss, who themselves are available only on classified sites who, the moment you give them your phone number, expect the spam calls and scam texts to moon like some meme crypto that Elon shouts out when he needs to dump some coins.

In europe, currently APC delivers cheap products (as perceived robustness and design) for the lower part of the range with a really hefty price; of course there are exceptions (Smart-UPS lineup is quite reliable and sturdy).

Eaton 5e Lineup has biggest defect of front USB connector (so you have two-headed UPS).

 

If you're satisfied with APC, go for it anytime, anyhow.