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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

After watching Geerling's video on YouTube about building an ARM NAS I almost went that direction -- but opted for a Synology DS918+ instead because my need for a NAS is not just experimental but something that needs to work reliably.

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You are right that Synology (or an equivalent appliance) is often best. It's more complicated for geeks and data hoarders once we've been using a Synology for a while.

When people go down the Synology path they are often running apps and doing more than providing a big pool of storage. I'm finding that my needs have changed towards my NAS being only a pool of storage on my local network. It is there as the first tier of backups to speed up disaster recovery. I feel confident that I could move to a more DIY NAS solution because it would only be used for NAS storage.

It's not ideal, but an old desktop is now much better for my app needs, including Plex. Ideally, I'd have a single app box with the power consumption of 4-5 Raspberry Pi. I have only found a couple of ARM server solutions which are fairly old and ARM doesn't have standard sockets etc. because the focus seems to be on SoC instead of replicating what I'm used to with PCs and ATX mobos.

I have used an ARM Synology NAS but found it highly inadequate for running services ... or anything but basic storage, really.

Only the x86 models support running Linux containers, packaging an application for Synology didn't exactly seem easy to to and the UI is almost unusably sluggish and has super confusing UX (it emulates a desktop environment in the browser ... right, very cool).

Running an own standard Linux-based NAS is more effort, but not terribly so. The additional flexibility may be worth it: It makes it quite painless to integrate with other data sources and sinks for backups and stuff and can run a lot of personal services (home automation, budgeting tool, IRC bouncer ...).

There seemed to be change on their low-end stuff when the DS120j/220j came out. The processor and RAM finally seemed enough to not spin off into oblivion, if you avoided the software that catalogs image files.

They are dual-core, 512MB RAM, where the previous DS110j was single core, 128MB RAM and the DS115j was single core, 256MB RAM. The previous models just ran way too close to CPU starvation or swapping hell.

Still happy after 4 years with my Odroid XU4/Cloudshell2 - now runs with Dual 16TB. But yes, it is only a storage backend (for Borg Backups), not much more.

The HD controller? (the main IC in the center of the front-panel board) in my Cloudshell 2 imploded recently, now I am stuck trying to figure out what to do. I really don't want to shell out for a whole new NAS, and the XU4 is still running great after repasting the heatsink... but it randomly loses the drives when there's too much activity (I tried libata.force=1.5G, but no luck).

Likely the USB-Cable from XU4 to HD controller - exchange it. Hardkernel confirmed that their cables were poor quality and resulted in many disconnects. Mine were gone after exchanging cables.

I have to say my Odroid only runs once a week - started remotely through IPSEC for offsite backups. So it is not a 24/7 setup.

It's not the cable - the main IC in the board that the drives plug into "imploded" - there are cracks in package and it's sunken in. I was running it for ~4 years essentially 100% uptime, but took it down in early 2019 and didn't get it set back up until now.

Yes, that makes sense. With the cable I was referring to the random drive disconnects, as I had those, too. About the imploded IC: Not much to do about it - either get a replacement board (well, they are not sold anymore). Or try to recover the Raid 1 disks (if this is what you are using) using an external usb-mount. I heard that the raid is formatted with standard mdadm, so perhaps possible to recover without the original IC. Would be interesting to follow up - please report if you recover your drives somehow.

I agonized about this for years. I wanted a proper server, not something embedded or a Pi with a rat's nest of cables, that would still fit in a credenza in the living room.

Ended up getting an HP MicroServer Gen8 and absolutely love it. Same cube design as the DS918+, but with proper iLO (remote media, etc.), lots of boot options, and very stoutly built. It feels like a real HP DL300-series server (the Gen9 does not IMHO). I bought it as it was being discontinued.

It's running VMware ESXi with FreeNAS on top of that, with an LSI SAS card connected to the drive bays, then hardware-pass-through'ed to the FreeNAS VM. I've got the home's DNS server, Pi-hole, Unifi controller, test VMs, etc. happily virtualized alongside FreeNAS. 16GB RAM total, with 8GB dedicated to FreeNAS. Boot is off a microSD card (on the motherboard, naturally) and VM datastore is on an SSD connected where the optical drive would go.

I know I'm violating several recommendations here (low RAM, virtualized FreeNAS, SAS card passed through, etc. etc.) but it does indeed work, very well in fact. 2+ years of serving the home. With the Gen8, HP built almost the perfect home server for tech-oriented types... pity they cost-reduced its successor.

Yep, I did the same, though currently running on a much older version. Ubuntu, ZFS and a bunch of mirrored drives. The thing has been rock solid for years.

Yeah, doing the same, albeit with Solaris (probably a dumb choice but at the time, wanted stable ZFS).

My Synology has been anything but realiable in the past month or so. I've twice had to hard reboot it because it stops working. I think it stops writing all data, which means that even something as simepl as "echo "" > out" will hang forever. Can't even turn it off because DSM stops responding and "sudo reboot" hangs.

I have no idea whether it's a disk going bad, the file system going bad or the entire device going bad. It did give a warning that an I/O command timed out on one of the disks, but I've yet to get a S.M.A.R.T. extended test completed on the disk.

Does it hang with ssh timing out? In that case, next time it hangs try opening it up and logging in via the UART interface available on most Synology NASes. Also it may give you extra info if the kernel panicks.

No, it's usually just the individual command that hangs. I'm pretty sure I could just ^C end the `echo "" > out` command.

And I use pi's as interchangeable/swappable processors for a variety of different tasks. Its only casing which people tend to miss with pi's which can be addressed with 3d printing.

What happens when the Sinology dies? Do I have to buy another Synology to mount my array again? Does it have to be the same model, or family of models?

I haven't tried pulling one of the drives from my system and trying to read it with another box but I imagine just about any Linux system should be able to read BTRFS drives, no? Under the covers Synology's DSM is Linux with some proprietary apps on top.

Yeah I know at least ASUSTOR's ADM and Synology's DSM are both basically lightweight Linux distros (usually on an older kernel than what you'd expect building something custom), and they use standard Linux storage tooling (for mdadm RAID or btrfs).

I haven't tested it on Synology, but at least on ASUSTOR, the RAID arrays are set up using mdadm internally—so I was able to pull the drives, plug them into a Pi through a SATA card, and recover the array pretty easily using mdadm.

The vendor NASes do seem to add extra partitions besides just one main 'md0', though—so you probably couldn't expect to yank the drives from a Synology and pop them into an ASUSTOR directly.

I also tested pulling drives configured in the Drivestor and putting them in the Lockerstor, and that worked, but there were quirks if I tried in the opposite direction.

In the end, I would rather make sure I have a complete/separate backup of the NAS before attempting to move the drives, just in case.

I'd lean toward restoring from backup either way, since the hardware failure might have caused data corruption that's not immediately obvious.

Yeah. You can pull drives out and mount them in regular Linux. Synology uses standard Linux tools.

https://kb.synology.com/DSM/tutorial/How_can_I_recover_data_...

What do you think about Synology only allowing their rebranded Toshiba drives to work in their NAS? That's a deal breaker for me.

EDIT: Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596179

Where did you get that idea? Below are links to Synology acknowledged compatible drives with multiple brands and even that doesn't imply that only these will work:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=produ...

That's a Synology released four years ago. Contrast with a model released in February this year. Not a single drive non-Synology drive on the HCL larger than 4TB:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=produ...

It's not a hard requirement to use Synology drives, but on the newer/higher-end models the options to not use Synology drives are very limited. For example the FS2500 only has four models of SSD on the HCL and two are Synology.

IMHO, the price premium for the Synology branded drives is reasonable. Pay for the validated drives. Maintaining a broad HCL is no small task.

https://blog.synology.com/in-pursuit-of-reliability-hat5300-...

Is there a specific Synology NAS model with this restriction?

I happen to have Western Digital drives in my Synology DS920+.

12-bay and rack units? Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596179

That's just someone saying that - not an actual source. Anyone can claim anything on the internet.

The last Synology box I configured, a RS4021xs+, has currently a "System health" status of "Danger: The system is now in a dangerous status". In Storage manager every drive is listed as "Unverified" and with a red triangle. (Seagate ST18000NM disks, so quite common.)

I configured it about a year ago. Before I updated to what was then a beta version of DSM it refused to install all together, which was quite frustrating.

The list of supported drives according to Synology is depressingly short for this model - the only non-Synology or Toshiba drive is a single Western Digital.

Do you have a reference for that? I setup a Synology very recently with non-Toshiba drives.

Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596179

That's not a reference. Someone else just said that with no further backing behind it.

THIS is a reference, not that crappy link you had.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/compatibility?search_by=categ...

I have Western Digital drives in mine… it’s been solid and was very easy to set up.

That’s a strange lie. Where did it originate?

Synology supports a wide range of drives, including in mixed co figurations - size- and brand-wise.

I have schucked Western Digital Element drives in my Synology NAS with no issues. Hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people on Reddit are doing this with no issues.

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