DSM 7.1 DSM7.1 introduces new drive vendor-locking parameters

[Robbie]

Indeed this is bad and I would like to know that this is something that can be reproduced, but I guess there will be more and more similar situations.

It is probably true to say that the number of users needing an SSD volume on their NAS is relatively small, especially when you get into model specifics (although this may also impact those who use SSD caches I guess).

There will be some real pain felt by those who followed the Synology recommendation to the letter and purchased IronWolf SSDs. At the time, this was the Synology's vendor of choice for SSDs, with bespoke options in DSM and the (questionable) ability to revise firmware via DSM. In actual fact the SSD that they purchased SSDs would go on to be artificially crippled by a firmware update from DSM itself.

Not that the Synology-badged SATA SSDs have arrived here in the UK in any meaningful numbers. You can at least order them on Amazon with a 4 to 6 week delay for the dizzying price of £1,172.95 for a single 3.8TB SSD. Clearly it make no sense for anyone to buy a new empty Synology NAS impacted by this if you cannot get the SSDs to make it work.

For my current 6 drive volume it would cost me an additional £7037.70 to make the Critical warning go away, plus at least 1 spare SSD to cover the availability issues. Grand total of £8210.65 (€9644.00) extra, plus downtime, just to restore the same functionality I had... all for use on a £1k consumer Linux box.

️

 

[Robbie]

My entire SSD volume has now gone Critical with the Red warnings:

Nice friendly emails (x6) from the NAS:

Drive 6 on RS1221+ is damaged and is in critical status. Please back up your data immediately and then replace the drive.

Drive information:
Brand: WDC
Model: WDC WDS400T2B0A-00SM50
Capacity: 3.6 TB
Serial number: 2052F5420364
Firmware: 415000WD

S.M.A.R.T. Status: Critical
Drive reconnection count: 0
Drive re-identification count: 0
Estimated lifespan: 1%


Please sign in to Rivendell for more information.

From Rivendell

I cannot find a way of recovering from this without Synology correcting their recent changes to smartctl. I've dropped a support ticket but I am still bruised from them forcing both the diagnostics and the repair cost on me rather than honouring the warranty last time around. I can only guess they will play 'Tommy' again and ignore all actual symptoms and data in favour of their marketing and absence of candour.

️²

 

[ed.j]

This thread has got me thinking about what to do if (when...) Synology decides that my drives are incompatible. The annoying thing is that there is no way to know when this might be, but it's likely to happen. TrueNAS seems like the only viable way forwards.

 

[Telos]

TrueNAS seems like the only viable way forwards.

Agree. Might be helpful to open a subsection of this forum to TrueNAS, for those seeking to migrate, or desiring to learn more of TrueNAS (as their forums aren't so newbie friendly).

 

[Robbie]

I've just had the first rubber-door response where they conflate recommending Synology SSDs with a list of SSDs known to be incompatible with this model. Bizarrely, they forwarded me a link that showed there to be no incompatible SATA SSDs listed for the RS1221+ (not that you would expect any given the common SATA standard for SSDs - that is more an HDD thing) and that fitting Synology SSDs is just recommended and not mandatory. However, they say they will not provide any technical support.

As, ever, I have tried to be constructive and outlined a way forward but it looks like this heading in the wrong way (again).

TrueNAS has to be the way out in the longer term but for now I've got 4 Syno NASes, 3 in active use and in warranty. It is a big financial hurdle to rapidly replace all these units given the investment so far.

Agree. Might be helpful to open a subsection of this forum to TrueNAS, for those seeking to migrate, or desiring to learn more of TrueNAS (as their forums aren't so newbie friendly).

I support that idea, given the speed at which Synology is divesting itself of lower-end consumers / prosumers in favour of the deeper pockets of more major businesses.

 

[Gerard]

However, they say they will not provide any technical support.

Seems like we need to get in the ears of the Channel Managers rather than tech support of this issue. Channel managers have the relationship with their customers, and if Synology is wanting to sever that relationship this is where it's going to be heard. I'm sure tech support just moves onto the next issue, and is not voicing our concerns up the chain. I will try reaching out to my channel manager, and use @Robbie 's scenario as an example of one of my client customers.

 

[Rusty]

use @Robbie 's scenario as an example of one of my client customers.

Did this as well the other day already on my end.

 

[AdrianEarnshaw]

Watching this thread with great interest as someone who is thinking of expanding their onsite storage due to bringing more apps in-house rather than the cloud. A sub-forum about TrueNAS would be great as I would like to see how folks put their builds together for cost and power efficiency.

 

[ed.j]

An active sub forum for leaving Synology, on the largest independent Synology forum, would hopefully be a good enough kick up the behind for Synology to realise they are messing up.

 

[Gerard]

Did this as well the other day already on my end.

Were they receptive?

 

[Robbie]

Of probable no surprise to the grey-beards and experienced, the latest response from Synology was a selective cut & paste effort with a link to their own website that stated the exact opposite of the argument they were trying to make. Oops.

I have replied with a less selective cut & paste, attached screenshots of what their support pages and data sheet actually say and asked them to drop the pointless cut & paste efforts as a means of response.

Going through the Synology website today also revealed that Synology-branded SSDs are only compatible with and warrantied for approved Synology NASes and that use in any other device is prohibited. I didn't recall that being mentioned when they hit the various tech reviewers at launch.

Whilst the once worrisome future direction of Synology has already moved from speculation to fact, I am still genuinely startled that they made retrospective changes via DSM that have made my main Synology NAS pointless. I also don't see what Synology gains from this as I would wager that precisely nobody would think of spending over £10k on a brace of bespoke Synology SATA SSDs only to stick them in a range of low-power sub-£1K consumer NASes?

Thanks for the support offered above guys, it does help.

️

-- post merged: 9. May 2022 --

An active sub forum for leaving Synology, on the largest independent Synology forum, would hopefully be a good enough kick up the behind for Synology to realise they are messing up.

Do we have the scale for that? The teeth of Synology's own forum were removed a few years ago when they killed the old forum and replaced it with the current monstrosity where posts go to die.

️

 

[jeyare]

Gents, now you can deeply understand why I was so angry last year in case of Syno heading.

Why I’m not happy with Syno branded HDDs or SSDs strategy

In recent months, Synology has demonstrated how they want to fight for the enterprise segment: - new DSM7 demo and Beta - new enterprise level branded SSDs - same for HDDs let’s come clean. When any storage vendor wants to enter into enterprise segment, there is necessary to secure these...

www.synoforum.com

 

[jeyare]

Regarding the TrueNas by iXsystems (mother company):
- the Core product line isn’t a tool for newbies
- maybe near end of this year it will be more clear heading of the Scale product line. Still under development stage.
- I spent a several direct communication (out of their forum) with Morgan Littlewood and Kris Moore (product & dev VP from iXsysstems) regarding my list of inappropriate heading of some Scale subsystems.
- What I value is their willingness to discuss and listen to the opinions of the customer segment, who are willing to pay extra for the quality of support.
- However, I understood that ixsystems has limited resources and therefore Scale's capabilities correspond to this.
- if they manage to fix some serious problems associated with a clear plan = for whom we do the Scale system (yes, this disease is common for sw dev), then Scale will be a great system.

Certainly, there is no perfection in this world.

 

[Robbie]

@jeyare

The recent pace of change and the refinement of the TrueNAS GUI does make it much more approachable though and I think the switch from using DSM to TrueNAS is considerably less steep than going from having never used a NAS to using DSM for the first time. The terminology may be different and the extra features look daunting at first but setting one up to achieve feature parity with DSM is not onerous and only gets more complicated when users start to use the more advanced capabilities.

Another way some of us are looking at is that, after DSM what else is there? QNAP software is in the gutter, so much so that brand-avoidance is now deeply rooted, whilst others have gone and installed TrueNAS on their QNAP NASes instead.

I was brand-loyal to Synology's DSM but it appears to have become a trap where, at any point, Synology can change something and then ask a consumer to pay multiple-thousands of £, € and $US just to recover the same capability they had just days before. Synology appears to controlling how quickly and the number of customers impacted by each change in an effort to avoid too much blow-back. The customers are the proverbial boiling frogs.

The stupid thing for those in my position is that there is no viable way out. My NAS data is on regular SSDs and the equivalent year Synology SSDs are simply not available and have never been anything more than sporadic in availability. All this before the obstacles of price gouging and the questionable logic of adding an even deeper vendor-lock.

Statements from Synology that effectively mean "to gain full access to your system you must pay us thousands of £" used to be reserved solely for ransomeware criminals. Against this backdrop the technical complications of moving to TrueNAS at the earliest viable point looks ok.

 

[Rusty]

Were they receptive?

The info will be pushed up the chain.

Whilst the once worrisome future direction of Synology has already moved from speculation to fact, I am still genuinely startled that they made retrospective changes via DSM that have made my main Synology NAS pointless. I also don't see what Synology gains from this as I would wager that precisely nobody would think of spending over £10k on a brace of bespoke Synology SATA SSDs only to stick them in a range of low-power sub-£1K consumer NASes?

I should be getting the upcoming RS422 and/or DS1522+ soon. It should arrive with several Syno drives but I will test them with consumer drives for sure.

This behavior is not rubbing me the right way for sure, and I will try and push as much as I can to advocate against these scenarios in this fashion. I'm sure that both "worlds of users" can be happy and a fine line can be drawn without making these kind of radical steps.

 

[jeyare]

I am the only person on this forum who has tested TrueNAS Core and Scale, including the description of the Scale project reality here (you can find Scale + jeyare topics here). So I tried to mediate the situation with Scale:

One month with TrueNAS Scale (now in RC-1 stage) and Kubernetes

Tl;Dr : This is a long shot for those who are interested in learning more. If you want to use TrueNAS SCALE for purposes such as Minecraft server, this article is not for you. Note: TrueNAS Core is a successful running product - based on FreeBSD, which is diff. from the TrueNAS SCALE (in RC-11...

www.synoforum.com

and many more in other threads.


Installing the Scale / Core is not a problem. Using the Core is easy for Linux power users. On the contrary, any common user ends up there and doesn't move to the Docker stage - because the Core does not use containerisation but an isolated sandbox (jail). So the deployment of any container can be forgotten by the average user of this forum - unless he installs Ubuntu VM + Docker within the Core ... (no comment) . Useful for Mariu's followers, who install anything without realizing what they are doing.

On the contrary, the Scale is currently in the dev state:
- with a bit of patience, the average user can install the basic system (fast for skilled), including the use (dangerous state) of TrueCharts (k3s) containers, which are already pre-prepared in their catalogue (this is an independent project from iXsystems).
- but something different is to run Container Support + Portainer Orchestration Docker + k3s ... I got it working. However, it rests in virtual still, due to the instability and ambiguity of the development of the Scale product vs. what is defined (differently) on the official iXsystems website for Scale.

Conclusion:
- the Core runs smoothly - but it's not my destination. It never was.
- My Scale project is running and will only run on virtual for a long time. If the final product does not work after the development phase.
- Any transition (today) to the Scale is a jump into the dark
- but it pays to test it in that virtual machine.

Qnap is a dangerous toy from China.
Welcome to the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely & Dissatisfied Club. I fully understand your feelings. This stage of my life is behind me.

Synology has been doing "so much" for the last two years. However, the reality is really different. Any expectations of change will be more of a lottery as a goal.

 

[Robbie]

Received Synology's latest tech support message today and apart from clarifying a number of mistakes in their previous response about other manufacturers' SSDs being on the compatibility list for my NAS, Synology just reiterated their policy of killing all support unless Synology 'Unicorn' SSDs are fitted, effectively an undocumented mandatory requirement. They ignored all the technical points entirely.

I replied with my latest investigations that show the WD SSDs being in their drive database with smartctl working correctly and reporting healthy SSDs and SMART data via the DSM CLI. I also pointed out that a number competitor drives had been edited or removed by them from the database provided by Smartmontools. In contrast I also noted that it had been updated to include their own latest SSD model. Is this an error that accidentally neutered competing SSD manufacturer's products, or a deliberate act... who knows?

I asked for the case and the additional details I provided to be escalated. I am not sure why they are digging an even bigger hole for themselves as it is unlikely that EU or UK law would look favourably on their actions. The 'Block Exemption' rules appear to be clear as to what is lawful when it comes to this kind of thing.

️

 

[Gerard]

I am not sure why they are digging an even bigger hole for themselves as it is unlikely that EU or UK law would look favourably on their actions.

Sounds similar to the "Right to repair" fight going on.

 

[Robbie]

Sounds similar to the "Right to repair" fight going on.

Arguably closer to the EU Block Exemption battle all the major car manufacturers spent millions on, only to be defeated.

The car manufacturers had an advantage over bespoke parts and still lost, so no idea how Synology can refuse to support a defined technical standard of a very common commodity item, unless it happens to carry the Synology brand at an extortionate price.

️

 

[jeyare]

I've contacted a few people about this issue, I'll let you know

-- post merged: 11. May 2022 --

You can read my additional points to the TrueNAS Scale dev stage:

One month with TrueNAS Scale (now in RC-1 stage) and Kubernetes

Tl;Dr : This is a long shot for those who are interested in learning more. If you want to use TrueNAS SCALE for purposes such as Minecraft server, this article is not for you. Note: TrueNAS Core is a successful running product - based on FreeBSD, which is diff. from the TrueNAS SCALE (in RC-11...

www.synoforum.com

-- post merged: 11. May 2022 --

@Robbie
send me a Synology Ticket number for this case