Any experiences with Synology + BTRFS?

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We're an all FreeNAS shop and whilst it's been pretty good we're kinda finding the management, reporting and monitoring aspects of it leave a lot wanting. We use an older Synology RackStation for Apple time machine backups and management, monitoring etc. are a breeze comparatively.

Of course ZFS is wonderful and all that but with the advent of BTRFS on commercial NAS boxes we feel it might be time to re-assess our setup.

Synology's units have very low power consumption compared to the 16 bay Supermicro chassis we're using for FreeNAS (170W for Supermicro vs 70W for Synology) and would I assume reduce our AC and power bill to the tune of roughly £1000 per annum. In addition it's also quieter (can hear our Supermicro's through the server room door). SMART reporting is better. Backups are easier to configure and so on.

Wondering if anyone her has had any experience with the new Synology BTRFS compatible NAS boxes like the RS2416+? Is BTRFS on it it ready for prime time?
 
100W less per NAS box and sounds like they have multiple. If they run cooler then you end up with power savings from the climate control system not working as hard as well.
 
Last edited:
Gman1979 said:
100W less per NAS box and sounds like they have multiple. If they run cooler then you end up with power savings from the climate control system not working as hard as well.
Click to expand...

Exactly. We have quite a few Supermicro's and also AC to cool the heat they put out. All together we'd save 1000W or so per annum roughly by swapping the Supermicro's for Synology's. In the UK 1W running 24/7 is roughly £1 per year (it's actually a bit more) hence the £1000 figure.
 
Supermicro is mainly a high performance solution but they offer low power systems with lower performance as well - similar to a Synology.

Synology is mainly a high comfort, low power, low performance solution but they offer faster systems as well.
If you use Synology/ Xpenology or any Linux on the same hardware, power consumption is quite similar.

You should not compare a high power high performance Xeon solution vs an Atom or a solution with a smartphone alike CPU. This is like comparing a Porsche vs a Honda complaining the fuel consumption of the first.
 
I take your point but we do find the Synology Rackstation we currently have (RS2212+) plenty fast with SSD caching when compared to our 16x bay SSD SLOG equipped FreeNAS box.

We'd be looking at the RS2416+ at a minimum which has a fairly powerful Atom (as powerful as Atoms get anyways!). Even the Synology flagship RS18016xs+ which has the same CPU as our Supermicro based FreeNAS boxes only consumes 106W at load.

I'm guessing it gains efficency from not having extra HBA controllers, IPMI and a simpler backplane.

The Supermicro's we use have Xeon E3-1220L V2 which are low power variants. We have platinum high efficiency power supplies and all fans in the chassis set to run at 5V vs 12V so we've tricked them out to run as efficiently as possible. I think all our tweaks took power consumption down per box from 250W to 170W.

With Synology we find the software pretty compelling, solid and super easy to use. It's also really nice not having to be a system integrator with Synology which should end up reducing our support costs. Just wondering now more whether BTRFS is a viable challenger to ZFS if company's like Synology are shipping it.

Power efficency would merely be the icing on the cake.
 
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