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Comment by mfkp | Hacker News Reader

I switched from Synology to QNAP about 5 years ago (after my Synology NAS decided to stop reading disks using their proprietary RAID, and Synology support said "sorry, we don't know how to fix it". Lost 8tb of data that day).

Two lessons learned: 1) Don't use proprietary raid, 2) Don't ever use Synology devices.

QNAP has been great though, I've been very happy so far and zero issues.

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Synology uses bog-standard mdraid. You can read the volumes on any linux machine.

Maybe I'll have to take another look at it when I have some free time, although I vaguely remember something not working right with the standard mdraid tools. According to this post, it seems to be a slightly customized version: https://serverfault.com/questions/568166/how-to-recover-an-m...

Thinking back on this situation made me remember the terrible thermals in that old NAS. I had to replace the (fanless) PSU 2 times because it was always blowing up and creating sparks/smoke. Lol good times.

They have it customized, they have also btrfs integrated with md, which is not in the stock kernel, but these are runtime things. Not to say there are not a ways to shoot yourself in the foot (e.g. being careful when creating ext4 volume with external machine, target nas might have older kernel that doesn't support half of the newer ext4 features and 64 bits).

I never had any problem with thermals or psu, but I've heard other people had psu problems.

On their older models, the webUI did something funky with LUKS encryption passwords meaning you couldn't actually just mount the disks in another Linux computer as you coukd never unlock them. I have memories of us having to do the encryption setup and unlock via ssh so we could mount the drives in something else in the event of a failure (though we retired that box over 5 years ago so my memory might be rusty).

edit: my memory _is_ rusty; it was a QNAP box we had to do that with not Synology.

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