Do you see that thing over there? The Synology Disk Station DS409? It’s crap.
It’s not the usual hardware RAID problems that make it so crappy.
Yes, it’s slow. Painfully slow.
Yes, it has a weird Linux kernel that, somehow, manages to do put all NFS clients into
df: `/mirror’: Permission denied
if you change any export permissions. Any. Not even on the volume in question. Or
df: `/mirror’: Stale file handle
if you reboot it. How have they even managed to do that?
No, it’s not that.
It’s that if one of the disks break (as they are wont to do, which is why we have the “R” and “I” in “RAID”), which usually happens at 2am, the thing starts beeping.
Loudly.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
And there’s no way to turn the beeping off. Other than switching the entire thing off. So you have a redundant disk system, but if one of the disks break, it starts beeping so loud that it’ll wake all the neighbours, so you just have to switch it off until you can find a new disk to replace the old one.
So it’s redundant, but you can’t use it. Ingenious.
The only thing I can recommend about the Synology DS409 is that it’s less unstable than any of the other commodity hardware RAID devices I’ve used. Which means that as soon as 4TB disks become available, I’m going to just make a two disk soft RAID device and escape the horrible clutches of hardware RAID makers.
(I should make this blog into an electronic consumer review site, shouldn’t I?)
Hi Lars,
My name is Jason from Synology. I ask of you to submit a support ticket to our support team so we can further assist you in regards to your issue.
You can submit a ticket here – http://www.synology.com/support/support_form.php?lang=us
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Thank you for following up, but I will not be submitting a bug report to Synology or spending any more time on the issue.
If you want to fix the two issues I've written about here (not being able to switch off the beeping, and the NFS mount points going AWOL after reloading the permissions) for your other customers, then please be my guest.
Lars
They don't want to fix anything.
They want to create the illusion of good customer service by paying a million people in India and China pennies a day to stalk internet message boards and leave these sweet messages but then never FIX THE PROBLEM!
Not any of these? Perhaps “Beep when volume crashes”
Control Panel -> Power -> Beep Control
I join the club “Synology DS409 RAID is Crap”.
My DISKSTATION (RAID 5) started to beep in the middle of the night (2 a.m.) reporting that Volume 1 is degraded, reason : HDD1 is defect. I replaced HDD1 with a brand new HDD. System started to rebuild, but in the middle of the night, DISKSTATION started to beeb, reporting that Volume 1 has chrashed because HDD2 is defect ! I contacted SYNOLOGY SUPPORT which asked me to make backup. I started backup (USB HDD) but in the middle of the night (2.a.m.) again beep, backup interrupted because HDD2 is crashed. But when I run S.M.A.R.T test, HDD2 is OK (and the same for the original HDD1)! Must face the fact that this crap station has failed and all data lost.
To turn off the beeps, check in Disk Station Manager. Go to Storage>Volume, for each Volume there is a 'Beep Off' button. Just happened to me and the setting turned off the noise.
Just adding my thoughts. My Diskstation works well as much as 98% the time, but that 2% means it cannot be trusted. With Windows it just stops communicating. It shows empty directories that are not empty and anything being saved or moved when it shuts-up-shop is corrupted. It works perfectly with my Linux machine. The web interface is very poor.