(The post title refers to an X-Ray Spex track: Oh Bondage! Up Yours! from 1977*.)
Synology NAS’s
I worked in IT (computing) for over 20 years, and I can quite honestly say that I never touched a home NAS before ten years ago. I’ve only ever used corporate equipment – particularly for file storage. And corporate equipment tends to be big, expensive and normally rack mounted. So, a home NAS box was something a bit new to me.
The concept of them is simple; you buy a NAS box with 2, 4, 8 or however many drives you want, then you use a web-based interface to configure it for (mainly) file storage. The web-based interface is simple and effective to use and will guide the non-technical user through creating the necessary bits and pieces. The acronym ‘NAS’ gives it away – Network Attached Storage.
Awesome.
So, the NAS box acts like an extra hard drive, you can store files on it (e.g., media files) and have them become available to multiple devices at the same time. So you could set up a media streaming service on the NAS and watch films from your TV elsewhere in your house steamed over your home network from your home NAS.
Brilliant.
However…
They all work on basically the same principal. A Linux-based operating system is used as the base NAS software, hard drives are connected for resilience, through software to create one or more fault tolerant volumes. Each volume can then store an amount of data and – depending on what level of fault tolerance you have opted to use – if a hard drive fails, your NAS can continue to serve your files. You can then replace the failed drive and rebuild the volume.
This type of system (usually referred to as RAID) has been used in the corporate world for many many years. Different RAID configurations give you different levels of resilience.
And this is where the worlds of NAS and corporate go their separate ways.
In the corporate world, you can do things like replacing drives and rebuilding volumes very quickly. It’s not always been like that, but it has for many years. So, if a drive fails in the corporate world, as long as you have a replacement to hand, you can be fully up and running again in minutes. Additionally, if you have spare slots available in your corporate server, you can add extra drives, configure them into your RAID and increase the amount of space on your volume, again within minutes. Nice.
Not so much in the world of Synology NAS. Yes, you can replace drives and have the system rebuild your volume. Yes, you can fit bigger drives (one at a time), and eventually expand your available free disk space.
How bloody long?!
But it takes such a long time to do it! An eternity. Glaciers have melted before a Synology RAID has rebuilt. And it’s not necessarily dependant on the type of NAS you have. Obviously, newer ones (with faster hardware) rebuild quicker than six-year-old ones, but it still takes an age for it to happen. I’ve rebuilt an 8-slot Synology 1821+ (2021 model) recently – each drive took two and a half days to incorporate. Two and a half DAYS. Each. Multiply that by 8 and you get 20 days. OK, I could still use the NAS, but the performance is reduced, and it slows down the rebuild process. So, I had to have my NAS box turned on for 20 days doing nothing but consume electricity and rebuild drives. At the current (ha) price of electricity, too.
But why?
Why does this have to be the case? Why? More to the point – can nothing be done about it to make this process very much less a) lengthy and b) lengthy. C’mon guys at Synology!
It’s probably to do with software RAID and data integrity blah blah blah and the fact that Synology don’t want to responsible for you losing photos of your Aunt Ada’s minge or something. I just thank the stars I don’t have to do this very often. I don’t know if other NAS makes are the same, but I sure know this one is as irritating as fuck!
If I have to replace my NAS boxes again – and the situation hasn’t improved any, I may cast out for a different solution. Then I can truly say; Oh Synology. Up yours.
* The song Oh Bondage! Up Yours! written by the late Poly Styrene, was a call to liberation. A call to be free from being bound by the laws of consumerism or bound by senses.