I hate NAS. Hate them!

Audio Gear Talk
1

They require management.
They don’t “just work”.

I have four 6 TB drives in my Synology, regular Synology RAID.
It reports 16 TB net RAID, out of 24 hardware.
It has been generally filling up, and now it is chock full.
Can’t be? Music and photography, with some duplication, but even so.
So I took inventory, and the thing reports that I have 4 TB of data.
No explanation for the 4X discrepancy.

So now I have to do troubleshooting.
Will probably figure it out, eventually.
But I hate having to do troubleshooting.
Who works for whom?

2

I had a similar problem with a Synology NAS reporting it was nearly full recently not that long ago. Turned out the space was being taken up by files in a recycle bin that wasn’t getting erased.

3

Hmm.
I can look for that.
But 12 TB?

4

If it’s a RAID3 array then one drive doesn’t get used for data storage. And you never get to use all of the reported drive capacity. So that figure looks about right.

5

Yeah, the 16 is right.
But the storage manager reports that the 16 is full, while the file manager reports that it contains 4 TB. That’s the problem.

Running checks right now…

6

In my case I deleted almost all of the content and reloaded it. But the deleted stuff was actually recycled. So I went from a 45% full drive array to a 90% full one.

The system is one place was telling me I was using 45%, which is what I thought it should be, but in another area it was saying 90%.

And it wasn’t obvious that this was the problem. I can’t recall how I realised it, or where in the convoluted Synology interface I was able to see and rectify the problem.

7

This obviously doesn’t belong in this forum.
Just became furious at the thing, for the umpteenth time.
An internet search showed thousands of people with the same problem, going back ten years.

I’m sorry.
Back to music.

8

I have a QNAP NAS and it’s no trouble at all. Just 4Tb of storage that sits there available to media servers and network users from everywhere in my house. I do run maintenance routines, usually a firmware upgrade, every couple of months but that’s it. As for available storage, there is a small overhead, but I get most of the 4Tb for data. Of course that reduces depending on your RAID configuration, but that’s a personal choice.

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9

It could have to do with the “network recycle bin” if its enabled by default on the Synology…
But i agree with @Nick_Cassidy, my QNAP have been trouble- and maintenance free as long as i’ve had them.
(Apart for the debacle with Seagate Enterprise drives last fall…)
I see no apparent reason why the Synologys would be different in that aspect?

10

QNAP TS-453 pro here never any trouble just works, only have to use the console every now and then to update firmware. I run tons of apps on it all the time never breaks a sweat and using the container station is so easy.

11

Actually QNAP had just recently a really bad firmware flaw. I didn’t bite me, because I hadn’t upgraded to that firmware, but I wouldn’t say QNAP ha a flawless record :slight_smile:

That being said, I’m really happy with mine.

12

I’ve got a QNAP TS-251 which is essentially invisible to me. It just gets on with the job quietly and without fuss. I have 2x 3TB on board in a RAID configuration and the system gives me access to all of it.

13

Qnap HS-251+ (dedicated to music files only), TS-253A and TS-228 working flawlessly :slight_smile:

Don’t know about Synology (jumped off that train years ago) but… last year Qnap introduced “Snapshots” (a way to save/roll back to previous states) which… can take a lot of space

14

About 3 years ago got into this whole NAS stream your music anywhere thing. It did not take me long to discover that it was more trouble than it is worth?. Spent hours copying over my media files then hours trying to play an album to my devices, Sometimes it would work and other times not!. Would constantly switch off or reboot the NAS to try and resolve problems. Even purchased a lifetime subscription to Plex and that was my biggest mistake? as the album tagging was mess with a lot of my albums not being recognised. Then it would take days to do so. As i was spending more and more of my precious time trying to work around problems and less and less time actually listening to the music decided enough is enough, Packed the NAS in its box and sold it on.

Fast forward to the present and in the past few days have set up a Nucleus with the experience being far more pleasurable and rewarding. was thinking of going the NUC / Rock route but glad i did not. For sure £1500 is a lot of money but at least now been listening to my music without Thinking what’s going to go wrong next.

15

I have 4 QNAP boxes, different models and different sizes, none have been any problem over several years of use.

I store only music files and back-ups for our desktop and laptop PCs. I do not run any programs or apps on them other than their own anti-virus/anti-malware programs and I keep the firmware up to date…

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16

Are you perhaps using the Synology Cloud Station? That software keeps about 30 versions of the files in it so you can always go back to an earlier version. But it also means that it uses a lot more storage to store al these versions. In the settings of the Cloud Station you can adjust the number of versions you would like to keep, or disable Cloud Station if you do not use it, and the storage will become available again.

I have seen this on more occasions and the Cloud Station has more than once been the culprit.

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17

I have 2 older Synology NAS and no issues.

If you SSH into the NAS and then type

cd /volume1 (assuming you have the default naming) then run this command. It will take a while to run but leave it running. you will need the admin password after the command below

sudo du -sh */

you should get a list of the file share folders and top level folders with a size indicated…something like this

272K	@CloudStationClient/
16K	@MailScanner/
408K	@S2S/
124K	@USBCopy/
5.6G	@appstore/
4.0K	@autoupdate/
4.0K	@clamav/
211G	@cloudstation/
176K	@cloudsync/
4.4G	@database/

…

18

From what I’m reading 8n the forums, it appears to be a combination of three problems: bad algorithms, bad defaults and a poor user interface.

One thing seems to be versioning (Cloud Station, as @rdg points out). The default is 32, I had set it to 5 (who needs 32 versions of a file). Versioning is a good thing. But it appears the Synology software can’t tell if a file arriving is actually changed, so every time I did a backup from my desktop it saved a new version. Wrong because both music files and photo RAWs are immutable, write-once-read-many, there should be no versions. And for those things that do change (Roon metadata, Lightroom metadata), the apps (Roon and Lightroom) do incremental backups.

And on the user interface, there is no way to find and get rid of them. I changed settings, disabled versions, didn’t delete the extra versions. Intentionally, it appears, because it didn’t warn me about loss of data.

The recommendation on the forum is to uninstall Cloud Station. What is that? Maybe I wanted some aspects of Cloud Station? It would lose all versions, maybe some financial data had important versions? I did anyway, this time it did warn me, and I have reclaimed 4 TB. So now I’m only 3X over, not 4X.

Some forums have said deleted files are recycled and stay there, maybe but I can’t find that in the user interface.

Some forum members (and @Wizardofoz) recommend going at the Unix level. But I refuse. I bought an appliance, Unix is at an uninteresting level of abstraction.

I’m sure it is possible to use the Synology effectively, if you learn it. But I don’t want to become a Synology expert. I want a simple storage device.

I think the root problem for these NAS vendors is that simply sticking drives and a RAID controller and an s by stack in a box is not a profitable business, so they try to differentiate by adding higher level features, and they are not very good at it.

I will keep futzing with it. But I believe it will end up with the final remedy for poor gadgets, put it in a burlap sack with a brick and sink it in the lake (metaphorically).

19

These days with 12TB HDD’s using a NAS is not nearly as much a requirement as it was say 5-6 years ago where affordable drive sizes were much smaller. I now backup my 6 x 6TB NAs to 2 x 12TB drives (in JBOD) on another NAS or as an external 2 drive JBOD

I have a lot of data … many would not need 27TB of space … but I’m in the IT business and have a lot of machines that get backed up and a sizeable 12.5TB music collection too.

20

I bought my first 2 bay QNAP with Marvell cpu? in 2009, and it has worked flawlessly without any other issue than that its slow. I bought a new QNAP 251 2-bay some years ago, and this has also worked without any issues.