Qnap NAS died...better alternatives.

cjcox said:
Everybody's needs are different though. So, for some, it may make total sense.
Click to expand...
Indeed, stuns me how many only gauge everyone else by their own needs. Not all of us require to keep 20TB of Anime video. How much data does a heat source plumbing company need to have? They just want to share docs and have local backups. Simple stuff.

Plus just cos HDDs have got bigger and bigger doesn't mean companies have needed to increase their data creation by the same amount.

Always makes me roll my eyes that so many here see a new say 20TB HDD come on the market and they see that as a challenge to fill it. Life is too short.
 
  • Like
Reactions: cjcox
like this
MrGuvernment said:
QNAP / Synology use standard linux formats so taking a disk out if raid 1 you should be able to read them in a linux based OS. or if an external attached drive you can choose what to format it in.

No different than say FreeNAS..
Click to expand...
With regard to more complex RAID types, do you know what they use? Linux "md", etc.? Not saying I'd "do it", but might be interesting to some if they have to recover a dead QNAP or Synology.
 
cjcox said:
With regard to more complex RAID types, do you know what they use? Linux "md", etc.? Not saying I'd "do it", but might be interesting to some if they have to recover a dead QNAP or Synology.
Click to expand...
I can not say i know for sure, but got me curious now!

If your data is that important it should be backed up 3-2-1 rule, a single NAS is not a backup, it provides redundancy no matter what raid config you use on it.

Sure with a DIY, but if linux based it would be no different than a QNAP/ NAS, unless you are backing up say your FreeNAS config to build an identical 2nd box or reinstall and restore and hope everything comes up...

if you are using Windows Server for a storage and using storage spaces, can you even restore those from a failed box?
 
  • Like
Reactions: cjcox
like this
cjcox said:
With regard to more complex RAID types, do you know what they use? Linux "md", etc.? Not saying I'd "do it", but might be interesting to some if they have to recover a dead QNAP or Synology.
Click to expand...
LVM or MDRAID with SSD caching / etc. if you poke at the disk format you can figure it out relatively easily. Been a while since I did it.
 
For DIY alternatives, there is the best, TrueNAS. You can build out a system. You can use hot swap bays. It uses ZFS, so even if the motherboard kicks the bucket, you can mount the ZFS drives to a new machine and remount the disk pool. Not to mention it's cheaper than Synology or Qnap. Especially if you use, used hardware like I do. Except the drives, I prefer to use new drives.

Synology has more features, but I prefer the DIY nature of TrueNAS.
 
OFaceSIG said:
For DIY alternatives, there is the best, TrueNAS. You can build out a system. You can use hot swap bays. It uses ZFS, so even if the motherboard kicks the bucket, you can mount the ZFS drives to a new machine and remount the disk pool. Not to mention it's cheaper than Synology or Qnap. Especially if you use, used hardware like I do. Except the drives, I prefer to use new drives.

Synology has more features, but I prefer the DIY nature of TrueNAS.
Click to expand...

This is all true. But if you want the features, easy setup, and the reliability, a nice Synology is hard to beat. Oh and real support, not people guessing on a open source forum.

If you like diy and the data you’re storing isn’t crucial, I think diy is great. And it’s fun and cheap usually.
 
cjcox said:
One of the advantages of DIY would be the ability to maybe get at the data though. Just something to consider.

Many people don't really need a NAS as much as they need good backups.
Click to expand...

cjcox said:
With regard to more complex RAID types, do you know what they use? Linux "md", etc.? Not saying I'd "do it", but might be interesting to some if they have to recover a dead QNAP or Synology.
Click to expand...

unRAID.

If a drive fails, array still works 100%, even when rebuilding replacement drive. If the server fails, each drive can be pulled and read (write/read) on a windows PC with free small software program. Been using 24/7/365 for about a decade in an HP Microserver 40L. Never a hiccup. But if it goes tits up, I know I can just pull each drive and get ready access to the data.
 
For cheap and kind of crappy DIY in a pinch I do two of these "Unitek" dual HDD docking stations with USB 3.
I have them connected to a Raspberry Pi, transfer speeds are okay.

I don't run them 24/7 and just power them down when not in use, but I have noticed they can do spin-down after a while of idling.

Fair warning: the power supplies for those units are of abysmal quality and couldn't even spin up two 7200 older barracudas. Luckily I have my 12V/5V stuff connected to a bench PSU, so no biggie.
 

Attachments

  • unitek.jpg
    unitek.jpg
    29.1 KB · Views: 0
antok86
Any updates?

I ordered a pack of 10 resistors and still have 9 left. If you need one to try the fix and aren't in a rush, send me a pm and I can send you a couple.
Fixes like this are what make me miss radio shack
 
2nd vote for Unraid and diy. The community app store in Unraid makes Unraid rival and better than Synology and qnap in so many ways. I hadn't touched Linux in 20+ years when I dropped into Unraid a year ago and was up and running in an hour.


Plug and play drive configuration that is just a bunch of disks meaning failures are not a headache that will have you scrambling for any hardware or software needs. Grab and old Dell/HP SFF used desktop and a SAS PCIE card and you have a NAS for about $200 including OS that rivals a SyN/Qnap of a lot more while running at a out 10w idle without HDs

Or piece together a full blown home server, like I did that serves as the central hub for everything now in our home (Plex media server, home assistant, file server, paperless, photo prism, Minecraft server, and more), Unraid has that much flexibility for you to grow into it

So go H and DIY with current needs and possible expansion of future wants.
 
Last edited:
I have a Synology DS212j that I bought in late 2011 and the damn thing is just now falling off of support for new versions of DSM from Synology. I don't think Synology is any better or worse than QNap, but it's a good alternative.
 
DIY is fun if you have the time. I love my TrueNAS system, but I can't see much wrong with prebuilts as long as the hardware is good. Those atom CPUs not so much. Good luck!
 
Neapolitan6th said:
DIY is fun if you have the time. I love my TrueNAS system, but I can't see much wrong with prebuilts as long as the hardware is good. Those atom CPUs not so much. Good luck!
Click to expand...

It really depends on what you're doing with them. They do fine utilizing quicksync for transcoding, and the limit of the physical hard drive is usually more than that of what the processor can handle.

I have a Synology 1019+ with a quad core Celeron J3455 (Atom based IIRC). It works fine. It will run for months without a reboot, and rebooting is only because of software updates. Maybe I'd like a little more transcoding power, but it's sufficient.
 
kirbyrj said:
It really depends on what you're doing with them.
Click to expand...

Yeah at the end of the day you are still stuck with mostly gigabit ethernet as the great leveller. When I run my QNAPs, as its domestic, I switch off and remove everything I don't need. Mine are just used as RAID1 data storage/sharing and a place for backups to be dumped to. I don't use them for transcoding/media playing or VM use. Data pumped in and pumped out. A quad core Atom will handle that okay all day.

I can imagine some folks here running a 8/16 core i7 with 32GB of ram for similar usage. Their power bill I guess.
 
If anyone is interested in some home server electricity usage numbers and operating costs. Measurements taken with a Kill-A-Watt meter.

Compaq PFsense box AMD single core 9/25/14 7:30 pm:
80 watts max boot,
48 watts idle
------
LUNA AMD triple core desktop, 8 GB, and 840 evo 120 SSD 7/2/2015
65 watts at the desktop, idle.
63 watts idle, monitor and speakers’ shutoff
------
Galactica Dell T20 server w/ Pentium dual core, 8 GB ECC, and 2 WD Red 3 TB drives in Raid 1
34 watts active
24 watts idle
------
Galactica Dell T20 server w/ Xeon 1225 v3 quad core, 20GB ECC ram, 1 cache ssd, 2 WD Red 3TB in Raid 1.
Hyper-V w/ Pfsense, Primo Cache, Blue Iris NVR
43 watts writing
35 watts running.
7:30 pm 2/21/22 start monitoring
5.71 KwH used in 1 week per KillaWatt meter. Full backups taken this week. $32.66 per year 2/28/2022 8 pm.
------
Home Network closet all equipment 2/21/2022
73 watts
Dell T20 w/ 3 VMs, Asus AP, Huawai wifi modem, 5 port Netgear 2.5gb switch, 8 port 100mb Netgear poe switch. 1 POE camera.
$70.34 per year
------
We pay $0.11 per kwh in 2015 at home. $48 facility charge + power consumption.

Determine how many watts are spent in an hour. If you have a 60W light bulb, for every hour the bulb is turned on, it uses 60W of power. Divide the number of watts by 1000 to convert the number from watts to kilowatts. 60W divided by 1000 results in 0.06kW.
Multiply the number of kilowatts by the number of hours the device will be used. If the device will be used for three hours, multiply 0.06kW by three to produce 0.18kWh. If a 60W light bulb is left on for three hours, it will use 0.18kWh of energy.

Galactica Server example:
34 watts / 1000 = 0.034 kWh
0.034 kWh * 24 hours of operation = 0.816 KwH per day
0.816 kWh * $0.11 per kWh = $0.09 cost per day, about $32.76 per year at 24/7 operation. 8760 hours in a year
 
daglesj said:
Yeah at the end of the day you are still stuck with mostly gigabit ethernet as the great leveller.
Click to expand...

There are many ways, even quite reasonable in cost, to expand your home network beyond gigabit ethernet.
 
daglesj said:
Yeah at the end of the day you are still stuck with mostly gigabit ethernet as the great leveller. When I run my QNAPs, as its domestic, I switch off and remove everything I don't need. Mine are just used as RAID1 data storage/sharing and a place for backups to be dumped to. I don't use them for transcoding/media playing or VM use. Data pumped in and pumped out. A quad core Atom will handle that okay all day.

I can imagine some folks here running a 8/16 core i7 with 32GB of ram for similar usage. Their power bill I guess.
Click to expand...
lol. Current NAS going in as soon as I get the ram is a dual 6-core (older westmere) with 15 drives and 96G of RAM, half of which is dedicated to read cache.

Also on 10G optical. It's a very small fraction of the actual lab power bill.
 
daglesj said:
Yes...but most don't.
Click to expand...

So what? Is this Hardforum or limp forum. The tech to go faster is out there and is cheap. I don't care if you don't want to or someone else doesn't want to. You are wrong to say gig eth is a leveler. It isn't unless you are lazy.
 
lopoetve said:
lol. Current NAS going in as soon as I get the ram is a dual 6-core (older westmere) with 15 drives and 96G of RAM, half of which is dedicated to read cache.

Also on 10G optical. It's a very small fraction of the actual lab power bill.
Click to expand...


hell ya 20cores 64gb and 10 drives on mine. Hard drives are the real power consumers not the cores or system itself. Spin them down and power draw is cut to nothing.
 
kydsid said:
hell ya 20cores 64gb and 10 drives on mine. Hard drives are the real power consumers not the cores or system itself. Spin them down and power draw is cut to nothing.
Click to expand...
Site A's power bill is currently $250/month for the systems alone. :p And it's almost ALL SSD too! There's only 20 spinners in the whole set.
 
I feel better with DIY builds I can tinker with. Easier to upgrade or replace faulty parts should it be necessary.

If your requirements aren't too heavy though then the prebuilt little appliances can make sense
 
I bought a DS1513+ in 2013 with 5x WD Red drives. I love this NAS overall, but it wasn't all roses, read below if you are interested.

After about 6 months, I had an issue where the NAS would boot loop. I followed troubleshooting steps from Synology which resulted in all data on my array being lost... That part of the customer service experience could have been better handled... There was no reason for me to lose the array IMHO if they just shipped me a new unit... I was using hyperbackup to some external drives, so I was able to restore with minimal data loss... Anyhow, they replaced the bad unit and I have been running that ever since. Synology is still sending security updates out, but no DSM 7 on this unit. Oh and all 5x of those WD Reds are going strong, haha.

I have been considering the possibility of a true nas build, but I am starting to come to the following conclusion:
1. I don't want to run it on old hardware and new hardware isn't necessarily cheaper than a Sinology NAS...
2. I really like having DS Photo backup my photos from my phone. I also use Google Photos, but I like multiple copies of my photos...
3. I have been using Surveillance station for the last 6 years or so as an NVR for my hikvision cameras. It has come a long way and honestly I like it. All of the common open source solutions that I could run on True Nas seem like a huge downgrade to me. Plus I have already purchased the camera licenses and they can transfer to a new Synology NAS.
4. Hyperbackup has been a simple to use backup / restore system that seems effective for my needs, not a lot of messing around...
5. Cloud sync is great for syncing a specific directory to my Google drive, so I can have certain documents available on my phone... And not have to run the Google sync utility on the PC I am using. Last I looked into that, I found you had to sync all your Google drive data to the drive of the PC running their sync utility... I don't want the SSDs in my machines filled up with stuff that is already on my NAS and they wouldn't let you sync using a network drive... Cloud sync is easy, configurable and so far works well.
6. Plugging my APC UPS in via USB allows for a graceful shutdown with basically no configuration, just plug and play. You can change some of the parameters if you want, but it is basically plug and play.

Basically I think your decision should be largely driven by the software features you are looking for. Synology provides a good overall experience that is easy to setup and pretty much hands off once you get it setup for for the most part.

Custom TrueNas, UnRAID or similar solutions are obviously going to offer the ultimate in flexibility, but depending on your software needs beyond just some file shares... it is certainly a lot more work and research to get everything you want setup.
 
Truenas and unraid aren’t flexible.

Synology is.

Add cloud access, easy backup, easy plex, low power, easy ups compatibility, wife friendly…

Hyper backup is incredible for the cost. Deduplication, compression, and incremental backup with client side compression. Easy photo backup.

Btrfs the easy way

SHR so you don’t waste storage..

Just works beats diy unless you must tinker. To do all that on/around truenas or unraid or whatever diy solution would take so much time…

Also, the 920+ and even the 420+ are more than enough for home users once they have their ram upgraded by 4-8gb
 
Last edited:
Keljian said:
Truenas and unraid aren’t flexible.

Synology is.

Add cloud access, easy backup, easy plex, low power, easy ups compatibility, wife friendly…

Hyper backup is incredible for the cost. Deduplication, compression, and incremental backup with client side compression. Easy photo backup.

Btrfs the easy way

SHR so you don’t waste storage..

Just works beats diy unless you must tinker. To do all that on/around truenas or unraid or whatever diy solution would take so much time…

Also, the 920+ and even the 420+ are more than enough for home users once they have their ram upgraded by 4-8gb
Click to expand...


Disagree, on your premise and definition of flexible. Unraid is about older Windows levels in ease of use and flexibility for core use cases and TrueNAS more Linux, akin to older Window Server needs. Synology/Qnap are for sure easier just like buying a Gateway computer in the late 90s made the Windows experience easier.

Everything you mention on Unraid stable is a core use case and easy to setup maybe a total 45 minutes tops to setup. UPS support is native. Either you have never used or it's been a long while since you used either OS.

Synology/Qnap are closed ecosystems and can't touch the flexibility of a custom built Unraid, TrueNAS install.

As for the wife factor, congrats, mine hates even Windows so it wouldn't matter if it was Synology or not , 😂
 
Last edited:
Unraid is totally useless for any of my use cases. No SSD performance caching - just old school time based tier, which is, well, silly. It’s 2022. Then again, TrueNAS or any ZFS solution has the same problem, as the SLOG is not a true cache either.
 
lopoetve said:
Unraid is totally useless for any of my use cases. No SSD performance caching - just old school time based tier, which is, well, silly. It’s 2022. Then again, TrueNAS or any ZFS solution has the same problem, as the SLOG is not a true cache either.
Click to expand...

Your power bills put you in a league ahead of most quite clearly so I'm not surprised. For home use with excess ram, SSDs and 10krpm enterprise drives as cache pools I have no complaints with my use case on the unraid box. The TrueNas box uses SSD and feel much the same. What OS are you using btw?
 
kydsid said:
Your power bills put you in a league ahead of most quite clearly so I'm not surprised. For home use with excess ram, SSDs and 10krpm enterprise drives as cache pools I have no complaints with my use case on the unraid box. The TrueNas box uses SSD and feel much the same. What OS are you using btw?
Click to expand...
If you're building a "network attached pile o' storage" it works great. Stupid easy to use, ignore it once set up, add containers/etc. Unraid is great. What Synology and the others offer is "that, OR a high performance NAS AND/OR a high performance block storage device" - much closer to enterprise kit in terms of functionality :) Even has a VAAI NAS plugin for ESXi! It really depends on your definition of "flexible" :D

As for what I use:
Dreadnought - 4x enterprise SLC SSD in R5 caching for 4x 3T Enterprise NLSAS, using Unity VSA software (Dell) - hypervisor is ESXi, all 10G
Masamune - TORbox, so it's running TrueNAS in ESXi (passthrough of LSI SAS controller - all sequential workloads and very limited random, so 2x SSD for SLOG and 1x256G for L2ARC, plus 4 big SATA spinners - it's a backup and lifeboat/seed for the site). 1G, because again - backups.
Bolt - 500G NVMe caching for 1.5T of MLC (R5) caching for 2.5T of TLC (R5), also Unity VSA, primarily iSCSI over 10G.
Mjolnir - 3T of NVMe (Optane) caching for 24T of NLSAS, windows storage spaces (so far, we're fiddling options on this one)
Fenrir - Unity 300F - 100T of TLC.
ArkRoyal - 6T of TLC Flash with OnTap Select on it (this is an experiment, may get changed)

And about 1PB of VSAN in various forms, plus 250T of Nutanix (most of which is currently idle waiting to be assigned out to uses).
 
lopoetve said:
If you're building a "network attached pile o' storage" it works great. Stupid easy to use, ignore it once set up, add containers/etc. Unraid is great. What Synology and the others offer is "that, OR a high performance NAS AND/OR a high performance block storage device" - much closer to enterprise kit in terms of functionality :) Even has a VAAI NAS plugin for ESXi! It really depends on your definition of "flexible" :D

As for what I use:
Dreadnought - 4x enterprise SLC SSD in R5 caching for 4x 3T Enterprise NLSAS, using Unity VSA software (Dell) - hypervisor is ESXi, all 10G
Masamune - TORbox, so it's running TrueNAS in ESXi (passthrough of LSI SAS controller - all sequential workloads and very limited random, so 2x SSD for SLOG and 1x256G for L2ARC, plus 4 big SATA spinners - it's a backup and lifeboat/seed for the site). 1G, because again - backups.
Bolt - 500G NVMe caching for 1.5T of MLC (R5) caching for 2.5T of TLC (R5), also Unity VSA, primarily iSCSI over 10G.
Mjolnir - 3T of NVMe (Optane) caching for 24T of NLSAS, windows storage spaces (so far, we're fiddling options on this one)
Fenrir - Unity 300F - 100T of TLC.
ArkRoyal - 6T of TLC Flash with OnTap Select on it (this is an experiment, may get changed)

And about 1PB of VSAN in various forms, plus 250T of Nutanix (most of which is currently idle waiting to be assigned out to uses).
Click to expand...
Did you end up calling dell to get a unity license since their license page is borked?
 
D-EJ915 said:
Did you end up calling dell to get a unity license since their license page is borked?
Click to expand...
I have ways for a few of them given where I work. That part is stupidly annoying. If you follow the forum threads - they screwed up a redirect …. Sigh.
 
lopoetve said:
I have ways for a few of them given where I work. That part is stupidly annoying. If you follow the forum threads - they screwed up a redirect …. Sigh.
Click to expand...
I've been having problems with HPE's partner portal too lol, finally the support got back to me and said we needed to reactivate our partner, nowhere did it say anything remotely close to that on that page hahaha.

I saw people made a way to run synology os on other stuff which is interesting I guess, you can do the same with qnap if you want except they actually have a license to do it.
 
Power is going up to 50c/kWh here. Synology rocks for power consumption vs alternatives
 
D-EJ915 said:
I've been having problems with HPE's partner portal too lol, finally the support got back to me and said we needed to reactivate our partner, nowhere did it say anything remotely close to that on that page hahaha.

I saw people made a way to run synology os on other stuff which is interesting I guess, you can do the same with qnap if you want except they actually have a license to do it.
Click to expand...
xpenology - super picky about what it emulates, so you have to have intel (there are like 2 AMD configs that work), and a specific number of possible drives, etc. It's open source, but that doesn't mean they have to make it easy. But yes, it does work. Prefers being a VM too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top