Does SYNOLOGY NAS Software live up to the HYPE? Testing Synology High Availability

25 thoughts on “Does SYNOLOGY NAS Software live up to the HYPE? Testing Synology High Availability”

• 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.

• 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.

• 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

• 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 the hardware (unless you spend a lot of money) is sub optimal, under powered and outdated.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.

• 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 4×1 GbE while the QNAP had 2×2.5 and 2×10 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’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…

• I would have liked to see the HA status and recovery after pulling a drive from a bay from the active nas.

• 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.

• I have been running two RS3617XS+ Synology NAS units in our two datacenters for over 6 years as cross datacenter cold storage targets. 100TB of storage in each with Cloud Backup connectors pointing at S3. I had both units racked, memory upgraded, storage installed, configured, and syncing data to S3 in under 2 hours. I also paid less than $20K for both, including disks, etc.. The software was amazing back then and continues to be amazing today. They constantly add to the apps, features, etc.. that the software supports.

  I also have a smaller RS1221RP+ at our HQ that our Marketing team's DropBox data backs up to. Synology has made it very easy to connect to storage vendors like DropBox, S3, OneDrive, etc..

  I have countless other Synology devices in my personal life from small family business with two 4 bay devices syncing to each other, and also home NAS for family photos, etc.. The nicest thing about Synology devices is that the software is the same no matter what size unit you buy.

• Nice video!!!! I am looking to build a similar functionality in TrueNAS Scale! but I don't see a straight way to do this.

• THROUGH THE MAGIC OF HAVING 2 OF THEM!!!

  love to see it 😍

• 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.

• Great video! I like the review and the small asides werent too distracting.

• You need a second chair for HA.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• How does it prevent a split brain situation?

• Oh I see Technology Connections reference there! 🤓

• With ipv6 been enabled it can cause problems for some people

• 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…

• The price is simply prohibitive.

• 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.

• 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…

• For a second there, I thought I was about to learn about the refrigeration cycle.

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