Warspite

DS216j 2-bay basic model

2x 2TB SATA in SHR configuration, ext4 filesystem

At family's place

Iowa

DS916+ 4-bay advanced model with btrfs support

• Disk group 1 - SSD
  • 2x 8TB SATA SSD
  • Volume 1 - "FAST data"
  • btrfs filesystem, this volume is synced to Backblaze B2 cloud for backups
• Disk group 2 - HDD
  • 2x 10TB SATA HDD
  • Volume 2 - "SLOW ephemeral data"
  • btrfs filesystem, this volume is not synced anywhere

At home

Upgrade options

I don't need more capacity but I would like more speed. That'd mean 10G networking, and I'd need that in my workstation as well, though it does have a 2.5G NIC onboard which is a decent start. Otherwise I'd have to get a 10G PCIe NIC, and somehow use the M.2 connector on the back side of the motherboard.

• DS1621+ has room for a 10G NIC addon, Synology branded but normal PCIe

• DS1522+ takes a mini 10G NIC, which is the perfect answer in my mind (non-standard vendor NIC E10G22-T1-Mini, but convenient

• DS2422+ is huge and takes PCIe 10G or 25G cards, that's way outta reach though
• DS1821+ also takes the same PCIe 10G or 25G cards

The 1522 seems like a pretty clear winner on price.

Let's compare the two on the bottom end for features as well: https://www.synology.com/en-au/products/compare/DS1621+/DS1522+

The older model actually doesn't come off too badly in comparison. I really like that the newer one is lighter and uses less power and has more RAM, but I really dislike that it doesn't have an internal PSU.

A possible alternative is to self-host, it's definitely not as convenient, but you can get a machine with tonnes of 10G networking for much less money, with the catch that the drive bays are now all internal: https://www.servethehome.com/everything-homelab-node-goes-1u-rackmount-qotom-intel-review/4/

You'd then run Xpenology on that, AND it's a nice rackmount formfactor with no power brick. Fuck yeah!

Actually, maybe fuck ALL that and get one of these: https://nascompares.com/2024/05/10/asustor-flashstor-gen-2-revealed-and-it-is-a-beast/

The Gen1 Flashstor was already sounding pretty good, but Gen2 should fix all the problems, namely lack of network ports and enough storage bandwidth. Now that would be worth like a couple of grand that you could be paying for a fancier HDD-based NAS, and I wouldn't even be mad that it's not rackmounted.

Tools

If you're SSH'd to the box, you can install/activate extra tools that you'd be used to having as a sysadmin.

sudo synogear install

Despite being called with "install", all this does is drop you into a subshell with access to the tools, kinda like activating a python virtualenv. You'll need to run it any time you want to use them (or you can mess with your $PATH I guess).

root@iowa:~# echo $PATH
/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/syno/sbin:/usr/syno/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin

root@iowa:~# synogear install
root@iowa:~# echo $PATH
/var/packages/DiagnosisTool/target/tool/:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/syno/sbin:/usr/syno/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin

rsync over ssh

Maybe I broke it, but rsync doesn't work as expected without some fiddling. I thought it might be due to cruft in my ~/.bashrc but I don't think it's that.

This works though:

rsync -avx --rsync-path=/usr/bin/rsync furinkan@iowa:/volume1/path/to/files/ /somewhere/local/or/whatever/

The error message suggests it can't find or can't execute the rsync binary at the far end, but I can't tell why.

furinkan@suomi:~$ ssh furinkan@iowa 'echo $PATH'
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

furinkan@suomi:~$ ssh furinkan@iowa 'which rsync'
/usr/bin/rsync