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Synology NAS owners: any tips for a beginner?
My new Synology DS923+ should be delivered next week, together with 3x6TB drives for a RAID5 setup, 32GB of RAM, 2x1TB NVMe drives and an APC UPS. It's almost certainly overkill as I'll be using the NAS mainly for automated backups (of computers, web servers and cloud services) and as general file storage, although I will also be looking into file syncing, running background scripts, using the NAS as a light development server, and maybe also for surveillance cameras.
Any tips for a beginner? I can find my way around most modern desktop and server systems but I have never set up or maintained a NAS. Are there uses for the system that no one talks about but which you have personally found incredibly useful?
I’ve had a couple of synology NAS’s for about 8 years or so.
I couple of things that come to mind:
Brilliant, thanks for all the tips! A lot of really good suggestions there that I need to keep in mind.
Yeah, it's definitely too much, but I came to the conclusion that I need more than the provided 4GB, and if I have two modules I prefer to have a pair of the same modules (although I'm not sure if it's still needed these days) and the price difference between 8+8 and 16+16 was so small that I thought I might just as well max the RAM.
I also spent quite a lot of time researching RAM compatibility for this model, and if everything went right, I should be getting RAM that the NAS both accepts and doesn't complain about. It's not ECC RAM though, but I couldn't find non-complaining ECC sticks where I live.
I'm currently running a Jellyfin server from a Raspberry Pi and will likely eventually move it to the NAS. Is there anything that pops into your head that I should be aware of before I do that, I mean the sort of silent knowledge that isn't covered in online tutorials and documentation?
I did a new install so I don’t know about transferring any of the data from one jellyfin server to another unfortunately. The only issue I have is that jellyfin won’t auto-run after a NAS restart , I believe it is a setting on docker but I haven’t spent too much time on it.
Thanks! Fortunately, my collection is small enough that I can just do a new install and copy the files from the Raspberry Pi to the NAS. Maybe if the NAS ends up feeling a final enough solution it will also finally inspire me to rip the rest of my DVDs and Blu-Rays.
Be aware that the new 923 doesn’t support hardware transcoding/decoding like the previous models did. If you’re doing any sort of transcoding, be prepared for some terrible playback.
Thanks! That's a good point and something I looked into before ordering. I don't think it should be an issue for me (fingers crossed). My current setup with a Raspberry Pi 4 isn't transcoding either, and I haven't had issues. I just watch 480p/720p/1080p content with my Nvidia Shield on my 1080p television.
I figured I’d mention it since I’ve seen a few posts in the Synology subreddit from people who didn’t realize that until after they tried to run Plex.
If you’re playing back on a Shield, then you’re good. It can basically play anything natively.
A lot of very cheap modern Android-based TV devices have native AV1/h265 support in hardware, but a snag some people may run into (and I certainly did) is that whatever software you're running might not know to take advantage of that hardware support, which is what happened to me with the Jellyfin Android TV client. Fortunately Jellyfin supports the use of external players, so I just downloaded one that does work with the hardware support for those formats and it's all good now - no transcoding necessary. That suits me, as I'm running everything from a DS220+, which has a pretty weak CPU.
My NAS is basically how I back up everything in my house, and also hosts my media library. I tried running a pihole on it too, but it was a pain in the ass to get it running with a separate IP address to the NAS itself and it broke when I got a DSM update, so I went back to hosting that on a separate Raspberry Pi 3 that I had laying around.
True, but OP said they're using a Shield. That can basically play anything.
I've noticed that a lot of those cheaper Android devices might support h.265 but they are lacking in audio codec support, especially Dolby or DTS.
I switched from a homegrown Pi-like server/NAS to a Synology this year. Moving my various Docker Compose stacks was mostly seamless — I just had to migrate from "docker compose" to the somewhat older "docker-compose", update paths to volumes, and fix ownership/permissions in a few places. I'm not sure why GP's containers don't start automatically at boot; that hasn't been a problem for me.
My containers include Home Assistant with Zigbee/Z-Wave coordinators, which include a USB dongle that needs to be mounted. By default in Synology the OS won't create the serial USB devices in /dev/, but that can be fixed: https://github.com/robertklep/dsm7-usb-serial-drivers
This is great to know, I really appreciate the information.
I'm learning so much in this thread, everyone's been absolutely wonderful with their time and expertise.
Keep your firewall rules tight and make sure your patches are applied ASAP, they don’t have a great track record when it comes to security. I would personally disable any public access.
Thanks! I'm definitely planning to disable public access and in general follow the principles of least privilege. I will try to set up a VPN connection for file sync and whenever I need to access the NAS from outside of my home network.
To be honest, this side of the project is still a little bit of a question mark for me as network setups are not my strong suit. I'm sure I can figure it out but it's the part of the NAS experience that I'm looking forward to least. On the other hand, it will also be a learning experience.
Make sure you set up an email address so that the drive health monitor can send you periodic health updates as well as warnings when something is failing. I did not do this, and much time passed (as it does). I happened to log in one day to find both drives (raid 1 config) in an unhealthy state. Fortunately, I was able to plug in an external USB drive and copy everything off before replacing the drives.
If you're feeling paranoid, you may want to consider buying drives from different manufacturers, or at least the same drive from different sources so that they will be from different batches. This can help with correlated drive failures due to a manufacturing defect.
A useful thing I have set up is automated backups of my other cloud services (google drive, dropbox). There is a "no delete" option so that it only adds files that show up, but doesn't delete ones that are removed, which is handy to guard against someone accidentally or on purpose removing all your files from the cloud drive.
Ah! Setting up an email address for monitoring goes to my list of things to do when the unit arrives. That's something I hadn't considered at all.
Ha! I didn't realise it was a sign of paranoia, I just thought it was the logical thing to do, so I got more or less matching drives from three different manufacturers (Synology, WD Red and Seagate IronWolf).
... I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo... in morse code...
~Emo Phillips
I've had 2 synos over the last 8 years or so and they've been fantastic. Started out with just a simple NAS on one of the J models and then got a 918+ when it came out. I run about 30 docker containers via docker-compose on mine for various homelab type things. With 32GB on yours you'll almost certainly want to do something else with it as well just to get use out of it. The normal NAS operations barely use any RAM at all.
Quick glance over my list is:
Wow, that's a really interesting list of things. I see I have plenty of homework to do to learn more about all of these. :)
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond!
Some things I wish I'd known before I bought my 923+, or learned while using it:
aptto upgrade the system, or building a Docker container where agonizing slow. I did not dig further, but I suspect that software often forces filesystem syncs, which I can imagine is a slow operation on a device like this because it has a lot of file caching machinery, lots of calculations for the RAID setup, etc. But this is all speculation on my side.Some things I've had to consider setting these up myself:
Make sure you don't treat the nas as a backup. Keep a third copy of your data, ideally something like an external hard drive you bring to your parents house or a friend's house or something that's not with you.
Make sure you turn on any scanning for corruption That's available. You should have it doing the equivalent of a scrub where it seeks through all of your data and make sure there are no bit rot issues.
The same is true for running smart tests. Make sure you're running those on the drives and that you have some form of alert when they fail so that you can replace them quickly.
You may have trouble doing six terabyte drives in a raid 5. When a drive fails a rebuild of the raid can take up to a day or two, and that's the time that your other drives are the most likely to fail. It's probably going to be fine, but be double sure you keep a backup in case it happens.
Assuming this is your plan, I wouldn't worry about using an SSD for caching/making your nas faster. You're probably going to be more limited by your network than your disk speed, because with a 1 gigabit per second network you can only write/read 125 megabytes per second onto the nas. Use those ssds for VMs instead.
Thanks so much for all the great tips!
Absolutely. For the data that is not in itself a backup of data that is stored elsewhere, I am considering either doing pretty much what you suggest, or setting up automated encrypted snapshots or a sync to an AWS S3 bucket.
Assuming you didn't mean this just as a Murphy's law sort of a thing, why is this the time that the other drives are most likely to fail?
VMs and container use was indeed what I was planning to use the SSDs for. My first test case will likely be seeing if I can set up my RSS server (FreshRSS) on the NAS, rather than running it on the same web server as my websites, like I currently do.
Not the parent poster, but usually this is because the restore activity is much more intensive than the normal drive activity, and that can be enough to fail a drive that is already marginal.
For two reasons. The first is that you tend to buy them at the exact same time, and when you buy them at the same time and one of them fails, the others are probably on the way soon too.
The second reason is that a rebuild requires you read every single bite of the other two drives in order to write all of those bytes to the third one. That's a lot of activity, especially if you're using it at the time so they normally have to read all of their data, they also have to seek around to whatever you want out of it too.
This is why I staggered my HDD buys for my NAS by at least a couple of months each. They're all different serials even if they're the same model. A single bad batch may destroy all of your drives at once if you bought them at the same time.