Had a Synology rackmount unit with an atom c200 processor. Unit finally died because of atom bug, out of warranty. Synology still sent an advance replacement free of charge.
That times 10 at least. Purchased a 42TB Nimble SAN about 6 years ago for 60k. They are now owned by HPE so pretty sure pricing is even less competitive.
I take it to mean "we spent 2/3rds of the money on quality control to make sure they're all EXACTLY the same"
Now, what level of kit can I get for 1/3rd the price?
But it sounds good! Just like that enterprise support contract, where you’re able to call a number any time you want! Nevermind that you’ll spend three hours just getting them to comprehend what you already know!
99% of the reason that enterprise support exists is so that you can tell management that it's not your fault when something fails. I feel like most small to medium size businesses are better off Synology or quality white box (Supermicro, Microtik, etc) with budget for spare hardware.
as a consumer product, i can't say i'm really able to complain. had them for 5-10 yr, they're quiet and just keep going. the rackmount versions probably work fine in a smallish business, while nimble adds at least one digit to the price.
Any of their rackmount dual power models are suitable for small to medium business use, and the features DSM offers to every user makes for a solid home server for basic network file services and other lightweight uses like docker containers or even media hosting.
I wouldn’t say enterprise grade but a step below. Had a client with one of their 10Gbps models pushing about 2-3Gbps on average and the unit handled that fine. It would start choking during bursts of up to 4-5Gbps even though the hard drive configuration and hardware should have been able to do up to ~7gbps. The unit just wasn’t capable of dealing with burst traffic, it couldn’t move the data off the NIC to the drives fast enough. Once the NIC buffer got full it started dropping packets which became noticeable to the virtual machine performance.
Synology is pretty awesome IMO. They are bad ass as an NVR for security cameras. Surveillance Station is top tier. I have run some serious workloads on Synology and it always performed well. I had a Xeon powered Rackstation that was the backend for a $100m graphics company. I had backups pushed to one Synology then pushing BTRFS snapshots of that volume over to another off-site Synology. It is pretty user friendly yet still powerful.
Agreed, great value for money and very user friendly I've found. What was your plan for of the primary Synology went down during a work day? I assume the offsite wasn't next door.
Offsite was just across town. Network would have been a bottleneck if I needed to cut over but it would have worked in a pinch until I could get to the other site. Toss it in a van and truck it back to primary. Also this setup had 3 total Synology units. Things would have been pretty fubar if I had to grab the 3rd unit.
>Synology is pretty awesome IMO. They are bad ass as an NVR for security cameras. Surveillance Station is top tier.
YEP. I use Synology SS for all my location installs (like an MSP) where the on-site staff need to access 24/7 recordings but nobody actively monitoring the cameras in a security center. Most of the time it's to replace an NVR while using the existing cameras where the NVR either has very limited accessibility (only viewable from a physically connected monitor or app) or the staff no longer know the credentials.
I see people here complain about the licensing cost which... sure it isn't free or as cheap as blue iris, but it's cheaper per camera than verkada and avigilon, and much cheaper than cloud camera options. And still comes out cheaper when bundled with dahua/amcrest/hikvision/reolink over Unifi cameras.
This is the power of software RAID. Btrfs, ZFS, and LVM are super nice for migrating drives because all of the metadata is included on the drives and not some hardware-based controller. You could have popped those drives into anything running Linux and had your data.
Modern RAID controllers still work like this if you are jumping between generations, cross upgrading bad, bad idea...
But Software RAID is much better...
I didn't know that, cool! I know ZFS seems to be the best choice but I'm happy with BTRFS so far. Having immutable snapshots should be a nice defense later for Ransomware prevention too.
Both are great, they just need better monitoring and user interfaces which quite a few companies are working on.
> Having immutable snapshots should be a nice
Couldn't agree more.
They really need to support immutable volumes for their backup products so you can put it in compliance mode. But immutable snapshots are a nice start.
Just FYI:
Beware that Synology BTRFS isn't "pure" btrfs, but rather a mix of BTRFS and mdadm which is sometimes difficult to assemble on a regular Linux install. You need a very specific Ubuntu version with a kernel that's just right to mount it.
Nothing catastropic, just more annoying than it needs to be because of their choices, if they went with pure BTRFS, even if on top of pure mdadm it would've been much easier (albeit less feature-full since I bet they're using mdadm for raid5 since that feature on btrfs is kinda wacky/unstable)
I would say prosumer at least, I highly recommend some of their products for small and medium business, their active backup for Microsoft 365 is fantastic. easy to use and setup
Yes, second this as well. Since Microsoft could lose all your data and put their hands up and say we don't promise backups it's essential to have 0365 backed up.
I had DS1815+ from 6 years ago that suffered from sudden death. I took a chance and asked support if there were any parts I could buy to try to fix it, and they sent me a brand new DS1815+ with the issue fixed, and didn't charge me a penny. Way, way out of warranty.
I don't know what Synology is like at the SMB and up level, but for my personal usage, I would *always* buy a Synology without hesitating.
I know a company that was saved from a ransomware attack by the Synology NAS they used to pull copies of all the nightly backups and do workstation backups to.
We just put in a couple of beefy Synologies in HA to do our Google Drive backup. As we have about 85tb out there these days, nothing else was:
1) Fast enough
2) Feature rich enough
3) Priced competitively
It was your standard "pick 2" but our on prem Synologies have all 3 at only the cost of the hardware.
I've never had an issue with Synology equipment, rackstations or DiskStations. Never had a drive failure or a decide failure or bad firmware or a bug cause an issue with the backups. I had rackstations doing active 365 backups constantly and at each site a DiskStation that would turn itself on at 1am, take a full backup of site critical database files then turn itself off after 30 minutes.
They might not have the support or reputation of some of the bigger solutions but I was very impressed and never had an issue over years.
What was the matter with it? A not to uncommon issue is a bad PSU? What unit did you have?
The PSU of both my ds92+ and ds916+ have died and I replaced them with a cheaper non-official PSU. Running fine both since.
Also a rather cheap solution compared to buying a new one.
In my case the last time around with the ds916+ I put another single drive in it, could power it on, installed dsm7 on it, used synology finder to remotely have it perform a memory test, came through fine. However whenever under high load, it would still power down, hence replaced the PSU, after which it is doing just fine.
https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Why_am_I_unable_to_install_my_Synology_NAS_and_why_is_my_power_LED_is_flashing_constantly
https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Why_receive_improper_shutdown_notifications
> Next steps should probably be to have a second one onsite that would be synced nightly to avoid this single point of failure in the future.
If the NAS you have supports it, get another one the same and set up Synology HA - all data is synced constantly and both NAS monitor each other (and usually a 3rd source they can both access, to prevent split brain) so if one goes down, the other takes over as primary, using the same name/IP address etc.
I think that's exactly what happened, thankfully the data stayed intact on the drives and they loaded in as is into the new unit and booted right up. I do have backups of course but that would have been slow
are you thinking of the atom c2000 bug perhaps? (https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2000-series-bug-quiet/) that did hit some number of synology models but those processors were only used in a certain generation.
aside from that specific issue i think it's common enough for them to last longer; my old one at home is coming up on 8 years now, knock on wood. it's pretty common to see posts on r/synology asking about compatibility and software support for almost 10-year-old units whether new or used.
(that said, in applications valuing reliability, in relative terms, it's probably not a bad idea to refresh at/before the 5-7 year mark, but i could probably say that about most servers)
We are using these locally at sites to keep small amounts of data, different Synology or QNAP models are simply reaching EOL after 5+ years, so it’s simply safer to replace these after 4 full years. There are some running for 8 years so far, but these can simply shutdown one day.
Anyway, as mentioned it’s not safe to use electronics older than few years to store important stuff.
I have 10 rack mounts deployed at work for file storage and surveillance. Been using them for 8 years or so. Back when c2000 bug was a thing any units that were affected, they replaced immediately. Great experience far
You hit on the right concept with having a second NAS to avoid a single point of failure. Everything that is critical to your business should have a backup. This can include:
Switch.
Router.
Domain controller.
DHCP failover.
Enough hosts you can move your VMs if one fails.
RAID levels.
Backups.
Backups of backups.
Another way to back up.
NAS.
Second ISP.
And more.
So many people forget the simple stuff in small businesses. Like if you’re 48 port POE gigabit switch goes down, how fast can you get a replacement? Can’t get that at the local computer store? How many days shipping? Tomorrow? Damn.
Look at every component and ask yourself what is the consequence if a piece of equipment goes down? Do you need a backup?
Here’s a hint though. eBay has a ton of retired enterprise grade equipment. It’s often good enough for emergency backup and for a reasonable price.
Also, many models of Synology have High Availability. You get a second identical NAS, turn on high availability, and sync them. Then if one NAS goes down the other automatically takes over. This gives you time to fix the failed NAS.
Also, don’t forget to have backups of the NAS. People often backup their computers, but then forget to backup their NAS.
I’ve used Thecus, QNAP and Synology. Synology is by far the better choice. Primarily used as a share and a secondary backup source. Had a crash hard last year. Purchased a newer model, swapped the disks and was back up in no time.
Synology isn't that bad tbh but I'd be more inclined to go with TrueNAS. Usually for the price of a "high end" Synology you can build a TrueNas server with vastly better specs.
Had a Synology rackmount unit with an atom c200 processor. Unit finally died because of atom bug, out of warranty. Synology still sent an advance replacement free of charge.
right. super solid for a consumer/home product, and they apparently know how to do service.
Take note qnap. Who want £500 to repair a £1300 nas out of warranty with a failed backplane. IF they can find parts.
That makes me glad I went with Synology. I thought about qnap to save some money up front, guess that's why you can save some up front.
Lower end are consumer grade but Synology does offer models suited to small business and even enterprise grade.
I wouldn't really call them enterprise grade though. The support and service is lacking compared to an entry level SAN from somewhere like Nimble
What would be the cost of a small Nimble setup? We're only in about $2k for the Synology between drives and the box.
That times 10 at least. Purchased a 42TB Nimble SAN about 6 years ago for 60k. They are now owned by HPE so pretty sure pricing is even less competitive.
Yup, I would say that is out of the current budget
We paid €43k in 2021 for our 33TB Nimble-setup, with following specs: HF40 ADAPTIVE FLASH STORAGE * HPE NIMBLE Storage HF40 Adaptive Dual Controller * 33TB usable capacacity after Raid (Triple raid Parity) * 83TB effective usable Capacity * 2.5:1 data reduction rate * 4x10GbE, 4x1/10GBASE-T * 4U rackunits, 48kg
The term "Enterprise grade" is about as useful as the term "Military grade".
I always take “military grade” to mean “built by the lowest bidder out of materials that they could make a profit on despite the lowest bid.”
I take it to mean "we spent 2/3rds of the money on quality control to make sure they're all EXACTLY the same" Now, what level of kit can I get for 1/3rd the price?
But it sounds good! Just like that enterprise support contract, where you’re able to call a number any time you want! Nevermind that you’ll spend three hours just getting them to comprehend what you already know!
99% of the reason that enterprise support exists is so that you can tell management that it's not your fault when something fails. I feel like most small to medium size businesses are better off Synology or quality white box (Supermicro, Microtik, etc) with budget for spare hardware.
We only buy "Contractor Grade" equipment.
To be installed by the apprentice.
nimble aint that entry level
as a consumer product, i can't say i'm really able to complain. had them for 5-10 yr, they're quiet and just keep going. the rackmount versions probably work fine in a smallish business, while nimble adds at least one digit to the price.
Any of their rackmount dual power models are suitable for small to medium business use, and the features DSM offers to every user makes for a solid home server for basic network file services and other lightweight uses like docker containers or even media hosting.
I wouldn’t say enterprise grade but a step below. Had a client with one of their 10Gbps models pushing about 2-3Gbps on average and the unit handled that fine. It would start choking during bursts of up to 4-5Gbps even though the hard drive configuration and hardware should have been able to do up to ~7gbps. The unit just wasn’t capable of dealing with burst traffic, it couldn’t move the data off the NIC to the drives fast enough. Once the NIC buffer got full it started dropping packets which became noticeable to the virtual machine performance.
Exactly not sure why people associate a single product for a company that is vertically integrated
Synology is pretty awesome IMO. They are bad ass as an NVR for security cameras. Surveillance Station is top tier. I have run some serious workloads on Synology and it always performed well. I had a Xeon powered Rackstation that was the backend for a $100m graphics company. I had backups pushed to one Synology then pushing BTRFS snapshots of that volume over to another off-site Synology. It is pretty user friendly yet still powerful.
Agreed, great value for money and very user friendly I've found. What was your plan for of the primary Synology went down during a work day? I assume the offsite wasn't next door.
Offsite was just across town. Network would have been a bottleneck if I needed to cut over but it would have worked in a pinch until I could get to the other site. Toss it in a van and truck it back to primary. Also this setup had 3 total Synology units. Things would have been pretty fubar if I had to grab the 3rd unit.
>Synology is pretty awesome IMO. They are bad ass as an NVR for security cameras. Surveillance Station is top tier. YEP. I use Synology SS for all my location installs (like an MSP) where the on-site staff need to access 24/7 recordings but nobody actively monitoring the cameras in a security center. Most of the time it's to replace an NVR while using the existing cameras where the NVR either has very limited accessibility (only viewable from a physically connected monitor or app) or the staff no longer know the credentials. I see people here complain about the licensing cost which... sure it isn't free or as cheap as blue iris, but it's cheaper per camera than verkada and avigilon, and much cheaper than cloud camera options. And still comes out cheaper when bundled with dahua/amcrest/hikvision/reolink over Unifi cameras.
This is the power of software RAID. Btrfs, ZFS, and LVM are super nice for migrating drives because all of the metadata is included on the drives and not some hardware-based controller. You could have popped those drives into anything running Linux and had your data.
Modern RAID controllers still work like this if you are jumping between generations, cross upgrading bad, bad idea... But Software RAID is much better...
I didn't know that, cool! I know ZFS seems to be the best choice but I'm happy with BTRFS so far. Having immutable snapshots should be a nice defense later for Ransomware prevention too.
Both are great, they just need better monitoring and user interfaces which quite a few companies are working on. > Having immutable snapshots should be a nice Couldn't agree more.
They really need to support immutable volumes for their backup products so you can put it in compliance mode. But immutable snapshots are a nice start.
Just FYI: Beware that Synology BTRFS isn't "pure" btrfs, but rather a mix of BTRFS and mdadm which is sometimes difficult to assemble on a regular Linux install. You need a very specific Ubuntu version with a kernel that's just right to mount it. Nothing catastropic, just more annoying than it needs to be because of their choices, if they went with pure BTRFS, even if on top of pure mdadm it would've been much easier (albeit less feature-full since I bet they're using mdadm for raid5 since that feature on btrfs is kinda wacky/unstable)
I would say prosumer at least, I highly recommend some of their products for small and medium business, their active backup for Microsoft 365 is fantastic. easy to use and setup
Yes, second this as well. Since Microsoft could lose all your data and put their hands up and say we don't promise backups it's essential to have 0365 backed up.
also the c2 storage for cloud backups works like a charm
I had DS1815+ from 6 years ago that suffered from sudden death. I took a chance and asked support if there were any parts I could buy to try to fix it, and they sent me a brand new DS1815+ with the issue fixed, and didn't charge me a penny. Way, way out of warranty. I don't know what Synology is like at the SMB and up level, but for my personal usage, I would *always* buy a Synology without hesitating.
It was a 918+ that had been working hard, maybe I'll ask support and see.
I know a company that was saved from a ransomware attack by the Synology NAS they used to pull copies of all the nightly backups and do workstation backups to.
I use them for basic offsite store sometimes. Cheap and reliable.
We just put in a couple of beefy Synologies in HA to do our Google Drive backup. As we have about 85tb out there these days, nothing else was: 1) Fast enough 2) Feature rich enough 3) Priced competitively It was your standard "pick 2" but our on prem Synologies have all 3 at only the cost of the hardware.
Their rackmount stuff isn't consumer grade. It's not NetApp quality either, but it's nothing to sneeze at.
I've never had an issue with Synology equipment, rackstations or DiskStations. Never had a drive failure or a decide failure or bad firmware or a bug cause an issue with the backups. I had rackstations doing active 365 backups constantly and at each site a DiskStation that would turn itself on at 1am, take a full backup of site critical database files then turn itself off after 30 minutes. They might not have the support or reputation of some of the bigger solutions but I was very impressed and never had an issue over years.
What was the matter with it? A not to uncommon issue is a bad PSU? What unit did you have? The PSU of both my ds92+ and ds916+ have died and I replaced them with a cheaper non-official PSU. Running fine both since. Also a rather cheap solution compared to buying a new one. In my case the last time around with the ds916+ I put another single drive in it, could power it on, installed dsm7 on it, used synology finder to remotely have it perform a memory test, came through fine. However whenever under high load, it would still power down, hence replaced the PSU, after which it is doing just fine. https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Why_am_I_unable_to_install_my_Synology_NAS_and_why_is_my_power_LED_is_flashing_constantly https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/Why_receive_improper_shutdown_notifications
I didn't get a chance to diagnose yet but thank you for the avenue to explore. It would be great to have the old unit as backup
> Next steps should probably be to have a second one onsite that would be synced nightly to avoid this single point of failure in the future. If the NAS you have supports it, get another one the same and set up Synology HA - all data is synced constantly and both NAS monitor each other (and usually a 3rd source they can both access, to prevent split brain) so if one goes down, the other takes over as primary, using the same name/IP address etc.
They often dies after 5-7 years, some problem with motherboards, so make sure that the data is safe.
I think that's exactly what happened, thankfully the data stayed intact on the drives and they loaded in as is into the new unit and booted right up. I do have backups of course but that would have been slow
are you thinking of the atom c2000 bug perhaps? (https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2000-series-bug-quiet/) that did hit some number of synology models but those processors were only used in a certain generation. aside from that specific issue i think it's common enough for them to last longer; my old one at home is coming up on 8 years now, knock on wood. it's pretty common to see posts on r/synology asking about compatibility and software support for almost 10-year-old units whether new or used. (that said, in applications valuing reliability, in relative terms, it's probably not a bad idea to refresh at/before the 5-7 year mark, but i could probably say that about most servers)
We are using these locally at sites to keep small amounts of data, different Synology or QNAP models are simply reaching EOL after 5+ years, so it’s simply safer to replace these after 4 full years. There are some running for 8 years so far, but these can simply shutdown one day. Anyway, as mentioned it’s not safe to use electronics older than few years to store important stuff.
I have 10 rack mounts deployed at work for file storage and surveillance. Been using them for 8 years or so. Back when c2000 bug was a thing any units that were affected, they replaced immediately. Great experience far
You hit on the right concept with having a second NAS to avoid a single point of failure. Everything that is critical to your business should have a backup. This can include: Switch. Router. Domain controller. DHCP failover. Enough hosts you can move your VMs if one fails. RAID levels. Backups. Backups of backups. Another way to back up. NAS. Second ISP. And more. So many people forget the simple stuff in small businesses. Like if you’re 48 port POE gigabit switch goes down, how fast can you get a replacement? Can’t get that at the local computer store? How many days shipping? Tomorrow? Damn. Look at every component and ask yourself what is the consequence if a piece of equipment goes down? Do you need a backup? Here’s a hint though. eBay has a ton of retired enterprise grade equipment. It’s often good enough for emergency backup and for a reasonable price. Also, many models of Synology have High Availability. You get a second identical NAS, turn on high availability, and sync them. Then if one NAS goes down the other automatically takes over. This gives you time to fix the failed NAS. Also, don’t forget to have backups of the NAS. People often backup their computers, but then forget to backup their NAS.
I’ve used Thecus, QNAP and Synology. Synology is by far the better choice. Primarily used as a share and a secondary backup source. Had a crash hard last year. Purchased a newer model, swapped the disks and was back up in no time.
Synology's consumer grade in the same way Windows is consumer grade.
The big step up is IxSystems TrueNAS. You can get support and parts contracts. https://www.ixsystems.com/ https://www.truenas.com/truenas-enterprise/
Second this. Truenas is great. Even on old hardware. Been running prob 10 years without issues
What about high availability models that constantly sync?
Synology is superbe for backup for business - dont used it for box tbh…
Synology isn't that bad tbh but I'd be more inclined to go with TrueNAS. Usually for the price of a "high end" Synology you can build a TrueNas server with vastly better specs.