Does SYNOLOGY NAS Software live up to the HYPE? Testing Synology High Availability
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- Опубліковано 2 сер 2024
- Synology has a reputation for having very reliable and easy to use software (Synology DSM). But, is it worth the premium in price over other brands? Today I'm exploring some of the features of Synology DSM, including their very easy high availability setup, to see if this is true.
Buy the DS224+ (diskless): amzn.to/4cSJ5bp
On sale on Amazon Prime Day (July 16th-17th 2014)
Also 20% off from July 15th-18th 2024 at B&H Photo Video (US), Newegg (US+CA), Memory Express (CA), and Canada Computers (CA).
If you don't need high availability, there is a lower cost model available which removes that feature. I didn't review this one, but here's the link, and it's also on sale the same times:
Buy the DS223j (diskless): amzn.to/4bwCm69
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Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
00:57 - Unboxing & Hardware
02:45 - Software Setup
10:01 - Replication
11:09 - High Availability
15:01 - Failure Testing
18:38 - HA vs RAID vs Backups
20:35 - My Thoughts
Some links to products may be affiliate links, which may earn a commission for me.
#synology #networking #homelab - Наука та технологія
Yes. The answer is yes. I was outright shocked but I haven't looked back since switching to them.
No. It's not for super high end setups but it absolutely works in my environments.
Being able to backup all of Office 365 for businesses with built in software is basically magic.
For a second there, I thought I was about to learn about the refrigeration cycle.
THROUGH THE MAGIC OF HAVING 2 OF THEM!!!
love to see it 😍
There's definitely a CONNECTION between those two pieces of TECHNOLOGY...
SHR/shr-2 is probably my favourite feature of these devices, expanding storage on existing volumes with larger drives is so easy using that. The built in software is also really nice, the backup apps natively supports cloud backups like backblaze etc.
On the beefier units you can do docker images and even full VM's as well.
These are great for people who want a plug and play NAS solution they can just use. Not administering a system, learning a collection of open source software tools, or running VMs or containers. The price premium is for a polished total solution.
Purchased Synology 213j over a decade ago. That thing is still kicking, simply refusing to die :) Attached small Proxmox mini PC for VM and Containers and simply using 10 years Synology as a storage server. Works perfectly for my business...
I was so disappointed to learn the J series won't do half of what I bought synology for. They really need to make it easier to select the right models.
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 + model or non plus model (just don't buy J or non plus)
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288They have a selection tool on their site that asks your use case. It could be more comprehensive but like dsm they try to keep it simple.
I have the 4-bay Version. Officially you can add 4gb of RAM, but i tried a 16gb module from kingston and it works perfectly.
Nice! I guess if you think about it why wouldn't it work with a Celeron processor.
@@theroboticscodedepot7736 that was exactly what i thought.
@@theroboticscodedepot7736 according to official intel documentation J4125 only supports 8GB of RAM.. but I'm running 20GB (4GB onboard + 16GB module) just fine
You can increase any of them to 20GB if you have the right type of ram
Can you install a pci-e card tho?
Great video! I like the review and the small asides werent too distracting.
Oh I see Technology Connections reference there! 🤓
Great testing, thanks!
I’ve been trying to backup one NAS to another, the highest transfer speed I’ve seen is 13MB/sec, doesn’t matter if I use HyperBackup or rtsc! Pretty hard to backup 10TB at those speeds…
Once copied to the backup device the backup program should not need to copy all 10TBs every time but only the files that have changed or are new files.
I decided to use two external USB connected M.2 NVMe 2TB SSD drives for my main backups which allows me to keep one of them offsite. The backup program runs daily and I switch drives out every two weeks.
For 10 TB's you could use an all SSD NAS like the Asustor flashstor or the UGREEN DXP480T to handle the 10TB of backups.
Bought my first synology in 2012 and had 4-5 different ones over the years. They are great for backup, file server, survailance, cloud, media server etc. A few downsides though is the prices if you need more than 4-5 harddrives and 10G network. speed For that scenario its better with one small synology for the sofware and apps and then a UNRAID server or such for lots of storage and network speed.
Sometimes my cat refuses to let me work also.
Have used mid level Synology boxes since 2010 and continue to be impressed by the reliability of their software and hardware. The throughput performance has not impressed me, though, compared to Truenas Scale which I have hosted on a Proxmox cluster. That being said, I’m apparently abusive to my cluster by frequent experimentation, so my Synologies present a safe anchor for my data. Have no experience with other commercial NAS systems, so I cannot really compare.
Thanks for explaining HA/RAID and backups in the context of the Video!
Do you know if the RAID1 of the device is also a BTRFS RAID1 (self ["bit rot"] correcting) or of another type? Are there automatic BTRFS SCRUB jobs in place?
I'm looking for these devices as offsite backup, which is then also usable as a NAS for my parents. For offsite backup I would then use btrbk (btrfs send/receive) or some different deduplicating solution...
I would have liked to see the HA status and recovery after pulling a drive from a bay from the active nas.
Surprise, surprise. The same conclusion as 90% plus of people who review Synology NAS:es. You don't get them for the hardware. What you pay for is great software you can do a lot of things with. And you did not mention it here, but if you have an Intel processor and enough memory they also run Docker and you can easily deploy anything that runs on Docker on them. I currently run all of my homeserver applications on a DS918+. Including 22 containers. Just using up half of my available ram (8GB).
Great start to any homelab.
That shit is way too expensive for just a piece of software then
Synology has been my bread and butter since 2016 for the reasons you describe. However, they have been increasingly forcing their own overpriced Synology-branded disks on us, to the point that some mid-level systems don’t support any third-party drives. Also, NVME support is heavily restricted. The enshittification of Synology is well on its way.
Lol that's crazy they expect you to buy their hard drives.
@@joeykeilholz925 for quite a few models, i think 8 bays and up for HDDs and for NVMe pool storage the requirement is a lot stricter, you basically have no choice but to, if you want access to all the available features of the unit! Bloody ridiculous for anything other than, and even then it's a bit of a push, enterprise level customers.
You need a second chair for HA.
What would've interested me a lot was a true test of the claimed "high" availablility. What I mean is, I'm currently copying a file from the the ha-cluster to my pc, and power of the active unit dies. Does the file transfer continue or complete? Same with copying the file to the cluster, does it fail and if so, does it fail in a easily idetifiable way (error message)? Or will there just be a corrupted file if power goes out near the end of a transfer?
Something much more tirivla: editiing a file on their not-google-drive, and while I type the active one loses power or network, can I just continue seemlessly and is everything I typed there?
The replication is done at the fs / block device level. When any failure occurs, the passive NAS starts up all of the same services on the same dataset and takes the cluster IP address, but anything in memory (including user sessions) is lost.
Since active sessions are lost, the not-google-drive will make you login again when failover happens.
@@apalrdsadventures ah ok, that's rather unfortunate. With both devices effectively having the same IP, I thought it was similar in implementation to how OPNsense handles ha and fail over. Is also a bit sad, since it seems most of the work is done, and just handling at least session hand over seems like a comparably small problem? But all that being said, it's still a very low price point to get any kind ok ha that kinda "just works". Which is also neat.
It's not nearly as simple as it sounds.
In OPNsense, they are syncing the config changes with xmlrpc (not frequent), firewall state table with pfsync, and sharing the firewall IPs (CARP). When a CARP failover happens, the user session table is already entirely in sync so nothing needs to change. They aren't syncing state for any other processes, so things like DNS caches aren't being transferred.
Here, they could transfer the virtual IP quickly, but all of the services running on the device each have their own state memory (i.e. Samba has active TCP sessions which won't transfer), and trying to sync all of those separately is a bit of a nightmare. Keeping memory in sync takes a lot more bandwidth than keeping disk in sync, but there are transactional database systems which try to do it. Every service running would need to be modified to deal with this, or they'd need to use services which are natively clustered (i.e. store all user state in Redis, and duplicate that). It's certainly not a small task.
Nice video!!!! I am looking to build a similar functionality in TrueNAS Scale! but I don't see a straight way to do this.
Which this? TrueNAS has great replication features, the rest not so much
For its price & hardware, it's insane how good it is. And you can run pretty much anything on it by using docker containers.
Not sure how good is BRTFS against ZFS anyways. But to be able to work with as little as 1GB of ram for that much capacity...
The really big problem with btrfs (and why it has a reputation for 'eating' your data) is mostly because it doesn't solve the RAID5 parity 'write hole' problem, which happens with all parity-based RAID unless they are specifically designed to address this. tl;dr when writing data and recomputing parity, if all of the disks don't complete their writes, the parity will be inconsistent and the block lost.
HW RAID traditionally used battery-backed RAM to prevent inconsistencies on disk (by fixing them on the next boot), zfs will always copy-on-write which can fragment the data in rare cases (which has negative performance penalties if the case actually happens, but is entirely safe and normally as fast), and btrfs will normally copy-on-write but potentially lose data under scenarios where a tiny write happens across a small block, in their design to avoid fragmentation. Linux mdadm (basic 'software raid') originally didn't solve this either, but has the option of journaling writes to avoid it (this comes with a performance penalty also).
In a mirrored setup, btrfs should perform about as well as zfs and mirrors aren't affected by the parity RAID issues.
If only you could have a clap and a second NAS "just" appears ... 😉🤔
Would these work as a remote backup NAS where your main NAS is another brand such a QNAP, Terra Master or UGREEN? So instead of pushing backups you would either pull backups using the Synology or allow the other NAS to push backups to the Synology NAS.
Yes. Using rsync, one NAS of almost any brand can push or pull files to another NAS of almost any brand.
@@jeffnew1213 Thanks! I will look into rsync
@@jeffnew1213 Thanks! I looked at rsync and it appears to be the equivalent or the Windows program RoboCopy which I use to migrate backup files.
When I started with my rack I was looking for a NAS first. Synology's software looked great, but their hardware was (and still is) so dated. At the same price the Synology had 4x1 GbE while the QNAP had 2x2.5 and 2x10 GbE and a faster CPU.
I went with QNAP and it worked quite well until I wanted to build a custom one using TrueNAS.
I have a QNAP NAS and for the most part I have been very pleased with it.
I did run into an issue with their backup program HBS 3 (Hybrid Backup Sync 3) and it's still an ongoing issue with them but I did find a workaround for now.
How does it prevent a split brain situation?
Odd to say that that Synology not enabling checksum by default has something to do with BTRFS. You just wanted to make a point about your preference for ZFS, but did it in a weird way.
It's odd that btrfs even lets you disable it, there's no reason to disable a feature like that
@@apalrdsadventures You should ask the same about ZFS. zfs set checksum=off
Edit: Per Synology documentation - checksum is not recommended on folders used for databases, virtual machines, surveillance station recordings or anything that requires small random writes.
The lame thing about synology is that they make you upgrade perfectly functional hardware, like my two old dsm's just to get cool software like this.
👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Did you just sit on your cat?
He tried to fight me over that chair! I unboxed later
Well it is his House ..
With ipv6 been enabled it can cause problems for some people
IPv6 only causes problems for network admins who disable it out of spite
@@apalrdsadventures consumers of these Synology use these mainly an only need local access don't need to be confused with ipv6 address
With Synology you're paying for DSM and their apps, for that they're more than worth the money, best in class by far. The downside? the hardware (unless you spend a lot of money) is sub optimal, under powered and outdated. I've got a DS918+ and a DS923+, and there's hardly any difference in performance between them, unless you have a 2.5Gb or better network, and are prepared to pay €150+ extra for the 10Gb upgrade! I really wish they'd "modernise" their middle tier prosumer/enthusiast range and bring it up to speed with what's available elsewhere. Unfortunately it does seem, at least to me, that to some extent they just don't care about that user base anymore and are focusing more on business and enterprise level.
I've been using them since they came out and I agree 100% that they are moving more toward the business/enterprise end. I think there is a price gap in the market that they are trying to slide into for small/medium businesses and even less traditional larger businesses. With that said, I hope they don't abandon the home user market completely, it is nice having the same software on all of their units.
For most home users good plug and play devices. However they have much larger rack mounted version target to professional use. Please never buy these bigger ones for professional use they are terrible and not what you want your company depends on.
No 2.5GBit/s or 5GBit/s ports? It’s not 2019 anymore 😂
On the other hand the CPU is based on the Intel Gemini Lake architecture which they revealed in 2017! It’s a historic artifact, amazing that they were even able to obtain such ancient chips.
About WD red HDD ua-cam.com/video/BCxl_VCEr2g/v-deo.html
The WD Red Plus is CMR. The WD Red is not. WD definitely made this intentionally confusing.
it is not hard to do replication/HA on your own with self hosted and you can do it better and faster than using synology - let's be honest but great you see the wisdom of dual nas - it is way to go esp for smb or anybody with mission critical data. what i would like to see you do is get a couple used older hp boxes (like 6th gen- the current refurb sweetspot) and install 10gbe plus 40gbe dual port plus like 32gb ram - you can do this for less than price of synology...and expect massive performance gains - sync nas to nas over 40g, have space to run other vms...
You won't even get 10G replicating between two with something like Truenas and spinning drives unless you add a fast slog which should be mirrored and have plp, or have a lot of drives.
The price is simply prohibitive.