Synology Nas Questions

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Struxxffs

Struxxffs

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  • #1
    Hey everyone,

    I recently made two post’s asking for help in transferring media files between different operating systems, and using small indoor security cameras like the Reo Pro E1 isolated to only be accessible from the lan.

    After saving some money, currently I am looking at purchasing a Synology 2-Bay DiskStation DS224+

    I will be putting in two 12tb western digital red drives.
    

    The drives on the nas need to be accessible from Macos, Windows, and linux.

    There are a few questions before purchasing.

    1. Raid1 or shr?

    2. The security cameras, I am currently looking at using things like the amcrest and reolink indoor cameras. Is it possible to use cameras on a nas without connecting them to the internet if you connected the cameras to a switch then connected that switch to the second Ethernet port on the nas?
     
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    Lord Evermore

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  • #2
    I don't think there will be any difference between RAID1 and SHR if you're just using two drives of the same size. SHR creates multiple volumes of varying sizes with redundancy to effectively use all the space on drives that vary in size. It can't do anything differently than RAID1 if the drives are the same size, except maybe doing "RAID0" with some space and "RAID1" with some and "RAID5" with some, etc., and offering easier management especially if you add more storage later. So I'd say SHR just for the functionality and flexibility in the future (limited since it's 2-bay anyway), but it's not going to immediately be any different.

    You would need to either hard-code IP addresses on the cameras or set up DHCP on the NAS to hand out IPs via the second port (I assume the NAS would support it, perhaps with add-in software), but then you should be able to connect them to that second port and it would be a physically separate network with the cameras having no Internet access.

    You could also just put them on the main network and simply not give the cameras a default gateway, so they couldn't connect outside the LAN, but they would be visible to any other device on the network when set up that way. Or you could do VLANs if your switch supports it, which will logically create a separate network just like a physically separate one, with less equipment. I assume the cameras will at least be trying to connect to the Internet in some way by default to do something like registration or cloud services, but if not, then it really doesn't matter if they can see the gateway. Nobody can connect IN to the cameras without you opening that up on the firewall.
     
    Struxxffs

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  • #3
    SHR for 2 bay drives if you want future upgrade to larger drives, and shr2 for 4bay correct?

    I will also be using the BTRFS file system if that is revlevant.

    My current router the asus rt-ax3000 does not support vlans, the managed switch does.

    The cameras will be managed using the built synology software for recording/storing the files on the nas, playback, and live view.

    If I understand correctly, without the default gateway the cameras can not send any type of packets out of the network but local devices on the network could still find the camera as long there is a ip address for each camera?
     
    Kyuu

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  • #4
    Area51Freak said:
    If I understand correctly, without the default gateway the cameras can not send any type of packets out of the network but local devices on the network could still find the camera as long there is a ip address for each camera?
    Click to expand...
    Right. Without a gateway, devices cannot communicate with other networks (layer 3 routing). However, they can still communicate with devices on the same local subnet (layer 2 switching).

    Just bought a DS224+ myself. So far so good, though I haven't done much except offload some pictures and various other data to it, and set up a container to run the controller software for my network gear.
     
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  • #5
    Area51Freak said:
    SHR for 2 bay drives if you want future upgrade to larger drives, and shr2 for 4bay correct?
    Click to expand...
    From what I read, SHR might be slightly lower performance, noticeable in benchmarks but probably not really going to matter over a 1Gb network when you're just transferring and storing files and camera feeds. So SHR would still be preferable for the average user in most cases for the ease of setup, future upgrades, transferring to a new (Synology brand) NAS later, etc.

    The only real downside is that SHR's formatting will not be readable on any other brand device, meaning you can't just transfer the whole array to another brand, or pull out one drive and connect it to a PC or another NAS to recover data, anything like that. RAID1 at least should be readable and moveable as it would use standard formatting that other Linux systems use. You could probably still use data recovery software with SHR to scan for files, as it's just the layout that is proprietary.

    Keep in mind the filesystem on the NAS is completely irrelevant to the devices that are connecting to it. They will just be using SMB, and never reading the filesystem on the NAS directly. (Filesystem would only matter if they connected with iSCSI.) BTRFS is perfectly fine to use.

    Since your switch supports VLANs, then you can at least work with the single switch (if there are enough ports) rather than needing to get a second switch just for the cameras. (Or just use two ports on that switch and a cheaper unmanaged switch for the cameras, if you don't have enough ports.) Just set up all the camera ports in a non-default VLAN (assuming your regular network is on the default) along with one port going the NAS's secondary port (or even just use the single main port on both VLANs), so everything is separated from your regular network. And maybe join the port your PC is on to allow you to log into the cameras themselves directly.

    I don't know anything about the Synology software being able to manage the cameras. I doubt that it's capable of doing things like actually connecting to the cameras' built-in management console to make configuration changes, like setting up the storage location. That's why you'd need your PC to be on the VLAN as well. (And might need to make changes to your PC's IP configuration to be able to talk to both subnets, or set up a more in-depth configuration for auto-assignment for both.)

    The local devices won't be able to see the cameras at all if they're on a separate VLAN without any routing between them configured on the switch (layer 3 switch), or without those devices like your PC being on both VLANs and having IPs assigned for both. If you intend to have all your devices be able to talk to the cameras, you may as well just skip the VLANs and secondary LAN port on the NAS, and just hard-code IPs in the cameras and not enter a gateway address. VLANs are intended to segment the network and prevent devices from talking directly to each other except when specifically needed, such as for specific management services.
     
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    Struxxffs

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  • #6
    Kyuu said:
    Right. Without a gateway, devices cannot communicate with other networks (layer 3 routing). However, they can still communicate with devices on the same local subnet (layer 2 switching).
    Click to expand...
    Lord Evermore said:
    From what I read, SHR might be slightly lower performance, noticeable in benchmarks but probably not really going to matter over a 1Gb network when you're just transferring and storing files and camera feeds. So SHR would still be preferable for the average user in most cases for the ease of setup, future upgrades, transferring to a new (Synology brand) NAS later, etc.

    The only real downside is that SHR's formatting will not be readable on any other brand device, meaning you can't just transfer the whole array to another brand, or pull out one drive and connect it to a PC or another NAS to recover data, anything like that. RAID1 at least should be readable and moveable as it would use standard formatting that other Linux systems use. You could probably still use data recovery software with SHR to scan for files, as it's just the layout that is proprietary.

    Keep in mind the filesystem on the NAS is completely irrelevant to the devices that are connecting to it. They will just be using SMB, and never reading the filesystem on the NAS directly. (Filesystem would only matter if they connected with iSCSI.) BTRFS is perfectly fine to use.

    Since your switch supports VLANs, then you can at least work with the single switch (if there are enough ports) rather than needing to get a second switch just for the cameras. (Or just use two ports on that switch and a cheaper unmanaged switch for the cameras, if you don't have enough ports.) Just set up all the camera ports in a non-default VLAN (assuming your regular network is on the default) along with one port going the NAS's secondary port (or even just use the single main port on both VLANs), so everything is separated from your regular network. And maybe join the port your PC is on to allow you to log into the cameras themselves directly.

    I don't know anything about the Synology software being able to manage the cameras. I doubt that it's capable of doing things like actually connecting to the cameras' built-in management console to make configuration changes, like setting up the storage location. That's why you'd need your PC to be on the VLAN as well. (And might need to make changes to your PC's IP configuration to be able to talk to both subnets, or set up a more in-depth configuration for auto-assignment for both.)

    The local devices won't be able to see the cameras at all if they're on a separate VLAN without any routing between them configured on the switch (layer 3 switch), or without those devices like your PC being on both VLANs and having IPs assigned for both. If you intend to have all your devices be able to talk to the cameras, you may as well just skip the VLANs and secondary LAN port on the NAS, and just hard-code IPs in the cameras and not enter a gateway address. VLANs are intended to segment the network and prevent devices from talking directly to each other except when specifically needed, such as for specific management services.
    Click to expand...
    Thank you :)

    Sounds like just using SHR, and also a separate ntfs backup drive (in case something with SHR compatibility becomes a problem for the future), connecting the cameras to the switch and not assiging them a gateway address is a simple way to manage things.

    It appears that the synology software is able to do local storage of the cameras by creating and assigning a local storage folder.

    How do I save recordings to a local or remote storage? - Synology Knowledge Center

    Synology Knowledge Center offers comprehensive support, providing answers to frequently asked questions, troubleshooting steps, software tutorials, and all the technical documentation you may need.
    kb.synology.com kb.synology.com
     
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  • #7
    Area51Freak said:
    a separate ntfs backup drive
    Click to expand...
    A USB backup drive is a good idea regardless of compatibility, if these are files that you don't want to lose or at least want to ensure you'll have access to for a period of time even if the NAS fails. RAID1 is not a backup method. It's redundancy in order to allow the system to keep functioning if there is a drive failure, but it can't protect from data corruption caused by software issues, malware, etc., which would get written to both drives, or if both drives failed at once or were physically damaged.

    If possible, the backup drive should be much larger than the storage on the NAS, and it should be performing incremental or differential scheduled backups using Hyper Backup, not just keeping a single copy. That way if there is corruption that isn't detected immediately, there's a chance of going back in time to get a clean copy, but any backup is better than none. A straight USB Copy every night would give you an immediately readable drive instead of having to install software on another system to recover from a backup image but since it overwrites the previous version, you may only have a bad copy on the backup. There is the Hyper Backup Explorer app so you can read those images on a Windows PC to recover files.

    Performance of NTFS on the USB drive will be very low, and there are some issues with it generally, as the Linux NTFS driver is not great and probably never will be (although you can pay for a better commercial one). The NAS itself will only format the drive as ext4 or FAT32, but you can format it as NTFS on a PC then plug it in. Or you can go ahead and format it as ext4, and there is software to allow you to read that on a Windows PC if needed. It might not be great, but it works if you're just needing emergency recovery.

    It does look like Surveillance Station supports a really wide range of cameras for direct management. I didn't know they had that integrated and put all that work into supporting so many. I wonder if it's because the camera makers have standardized the interfaces, because otherwise that would require a lot of code to support every brand and various models, and a lot of ongoing work for Synology with no additional income for it.
     
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  • #8
    UFS Explorer can read SHR formatted drives on Windows, I had a hardware failure of my Synology and had to find a way to recover the data. At the time the ~£50 version supported this feature, however it appears that now only the €200 version supports it :confused:

    The cheap €20 version does however support EXT4, so you could use that to read your backups if you ever needed to, but have the benefit of a bit more speed for your USB backups.
     
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  • #9
    steelghost said:
    UFS Explorer can read SHR formatted drives on Windows, I had a hardware failure of my Synology and had to find a way to recover the data. At the time the ~£50 version supported this feature, however it appears that now only the €200 version supports it :confused:

    The cheap €20 version does however support EXT4, so you could use that to read your backups if you ever needed to, but have the benefit of a bit more speed for your USB backups.
    Click to expand...
    Damn. That's ridiculous for SHR. All it's doing is looking at the partitioning format and array metadata if it's just a RAID1-type setup, I would think. The actual data should be basically the same as just a regular drive with whatever filesystem you put on it, the same as RAID1. I wonder if Synology requires a license fee for anybody that wants to support it, or if the cost is only justified because of the higher complexity when it's a more complex SHR configuration with many drives of differing sizes. It would be nice if they put support for basic SHR, just recovering one disk from an array where there was one volume, into the cheap version and limited it so it won't work with other setups, which would cover a lot of people's needs.
     
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  • #10
    Hmm, I might be wrong, it's possible the 80€ edition will cover SHR. Their website is not super clear about which editions do what. But I have definitely used it myself and it recovered all my files from one disk of an SHR mirror, no dramas. The base edition definitely doesn't include SHR, it does a load of other cool stuff, one of those "hope you never need it, but if you do, it'll save your ass" kind of programs.
     
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  • #11
    steelghost said:
    Their website is not super clear about which editions do what.
    Click to expand...
    Pretty common with that type of software, and things like "transfer from iPhone to Android" software, and other "recover your files" software. "Download free" and then all it will do is give you a list of what it MIGHT be able to do if you paid for it. And if there are different versions, they don't provide a clear comparison list.
     
    Struxxffs

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  • #12
    Lord Evermore said:
    A USB backup drive is a good idea regardless of compatibility, if these are files that you don't want to lose or at least want to ensure you'll have access to for a period of time even if the NAS fails. RAID1 is not a backup method. It's redundancy in order to allow the system to keep functioning if there is a drive failure, but it can't protect from data corruption caused by software issues, malware, etc., which would get written to both drives, or if both drives failed at once or were physically damaged.

    If possible, the backup drive should be much larger than the storage on the NAS, and it should be performing incremental or differential scheduled backups using Hyper Backup, not just keeping a single copy. That way if there is corruption that isn't detected immediately, there's a chance of going back in time to get a clean copy, but any backup is better than none. A straight USB Copy every night would give you an immediately readable drive instead of having to install software on another system to recover from a backup image but since it overwrites the previous version, you may only have a bad copy on the backup. There is the Hyper Backup Explorer app so you can read those images on a Windows PC to recover files.

    Performance of NTFS on the USB drive will be very low, and there are some issues with it generally, as the Linux NTFS driver is not great and probably never will be (although you can pay for a better commercial one). The NAS itself will only format the drive as ext4 or FAT32, but you can format it as NTFS on a PC then plug it in. Or you can go ahead and format it as ext4, and there is software to allow you to read that on a Windows PC if needed. It might not be great, but it works if you're just needing emergency recovery.

    It does look like Surveillance Station supports a really wide range of cameras for direct management. I didn't know they had that integrated and put all that work into supporting so many. I wonder if it's because the camera makers have standardized the interfaces, because otherwise that would require a lot of code to support every brand and various models, and a lot of ongoing work for Synology with no additional income for it.
    Click to expand...

    Agree that raid is not a backup method. Having two disk limits the options; standard raid levels of 0 through 1 or the proprietary SHR.

    A back-up drive (that is not internal) formatted to ntfs was for compatibility with Windows machines, but after suggesting ext4, looking into this file system, there are some great advantages to what ext4 is able to provide over ntfs. Also, you could always easily boot into a Linux system to access the back-up drive if it’s needed. Thank you for the recommendation and the advice about the use of back up drives. 



    The Synology Surveillance Station supports any camera with the ONVIF protocol.

    steelghost said:
    UFS Explorer can read SHR formatted drives on Windows, I had a hardware failure of my Synology and had to find a way to recover the data. At the time the ~£50 version supported this feature, however it appears that now only the €200 version supports it :confused:

    The cheap €20 version does however support EXT4, so you could use that to read your backups if you ever needed to, but have the benefit of a bit more speed for your USB backups.
    Click to expand...

    Thank you for the recommendation. It seems that the standard version supports a lot of different hosts and a good amount of file systems.
     
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  • #13
    Area51Freak said:
    boot into a Linux system to access the back-up drive if it’s needed
    Click to expand...
    Even that's not really needed anymore. You can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux to easily access it if you don't want to install an ext4 driver (paid) in Windows itself, although you need to install WSL and Linux to do that so it would be more steps, but would be easier to work with if you weren't just going in to copy all the files one time and would need to go back and forth. Or you could set up a virtualized Linux in Hyper-V or another hypervisor, mount the drive there, then share it via Samba. That avoids setting up WSL which is really for people wanting to "use" Linux stuff within Windows.
     
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  • #14
    Lord Evermore said:
    Even that's not really needed anymore. You can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux to easily access it if you don't want to install an ext4 driver (paid) in Windows itself, although you need to install WSL and Linux to do that so it would be more steps, but would be easier to work with if you weren't just going in to copy all the files one time and would need to go back and forth. Or you could set up a virtualized Linux in Hyper-V or another hypervisor, mount the drive there, then share it via Samba. That avoids setting up WSL which is really for people wanting to "use" Linux stuff within Windows.
    Click to expand...

    I have read a little about using WSL to mount usb hard drives containing ext4 file system.

    Would it would be stable enough to copy media files back to the nas if this situation was necessary?
     
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  • #16
    Area51Freak said:
    I have read a little about using WSL to mount usb hard drives containing ext4 file system.

    Would it would be stable enough to copy media files back to the nas if this situation was necessary?
    Click to expand...
    I don't think I understand the question. The files would be on the USB drive and plugged into the NAS if they needed to be restored. That's the point of using it as a backup drive. You would just browse the backup drive's restore points and restore the files you need from the NAS's interface, not plug it into a PC then transfer them back over the network to the NAS.

    Being able to plug the USB drive into a PC to access the files is for the situation of "the NAS is dead, I can't get a replacement immediately, and I need access to some files right this minute". The only reason you'd have for copying them by mounting them on the PC to send to the NAS is if the NAS was dead and you were replacing it with a different brand that didn't have the Hyper Backup app.

    But yeah, it's perfectly stable. You're just virtualizing a Linux instance and passing the volume through to it.
     
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  • #17
    continuum said:
    Yes. We use WSL2 all the time.
    Click to expand...

    Thank you.

    Lord Evermore said:
    I don't think I understand the question. The files would be on the USB drive and plugged into the NAS if they needed to be restored. That's the point of using it as a backup drive. You would just browse the backup drive's restore points and restore the files you need from the NAS's interface, not plug it into a PC then transfer them back over the network to the NAS.

    Being able to plug the USB drive into a PC to access the files is for the situation of "the NAS is dead, I can't get a replacement immediately, and I need access to some files right this minute". The only reason you'd have for copying them by mounting them on the PC to send to the NAS is if the NAS was dead and you were replacing it with a different brand that didn't have the Hyper Backup app.

    But yeah, it's perfectly stable. You're just virtualizing a Linux instance and passing the volume through to it.
    Click to expand...

    Oh I confused myself with the previous post and though you where saying to use wsl 2 in the event the drives failed and the data needed to be copied back over to the nas from the back up drive, but you where saying if the usb drive needs to be read or written to that using wsl is a option instead of having to use a bootable linux distribution or other 3rd party paid for software.

    I'm sorry.

    SHR is a mirror raid setup. You can only add drives later on if they are the same size or bigger. If you only added one drive (12tb) at first to copy files to, then added the second drive later, would it take a long time for the data (7 terabytes) from the first drive to be copied over to the second drive (12tb)?
     
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  • #19
    Area51Freak said:
    SHR is a mirror raid setup. You can only add drives later on if they are the same size or bigger. If you only added one drive (12tb) at first to copy files to, then added the second drive later, would it take a long time for the data (7 terabytes) from the first drive to be copied over to the second drive (12tb)?
    Click to expand...
    SHR is extremely flexible. If you make a small volume on the first drive, like 7TB, you could add an 8TB drive later on and mirror that 7TB, and you could also have a 5TB volume using that remaining space on the first drive, just with no mirroring. Of course that would be dumb as you'd be wasting all that space on the first drive, and adding another 12TB drive later would be cheaper than the original drive was as costs go down. That's not anything like your plan, just pointing out the flexibility.

    7TB would take quite a while to sync. Although the initial transfer might be pretty fast, it would get slower as the drive fills, due to the way mechanical drives work. If you assume a 125MBps average, then it would take almost 18 hours. (https://techinternets.com/copy_calc) There aren't any/many reviews of the WD Red series drives that I can find, with simple numbers about sustained transfers over such long periods, or at various positions on the drive platters. 210MBps is the maximum sustained according to WD's ratings for the 12TB Red I think, but on the inner platters you could see 20Mbps sustained, and on the midpoint it might be 90 to 120. So 125MBps for your 7TB would be just a ballpark and you could be looking at an entire day, or a good bit less than the 18 hours. Certainly at least going to need to let it go overnight. And of course if you are doing any file transfers during that time, it will slow down the sync.

    None of that takes into account inherent slowness of a RAID sync. It's always longer than a simple file copy would be. I would probably assume it's going to take at least 24 hours, assuming no other activity, if I was trying to make plans around it for some reason. Found one person on Reddit with a different model of NAS and drives that took 24 hours for 11TB.
     
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  • #20
    Kyuu said:
    By the by, if you're looking to upgrade the RAM in your DS224+, I can personally vouch for this 8GB RAM stick from Crucial. Worked in mine without a hitch.
    Click to expand...

    Thank you, I forgot to ask about ram compatibility. The amount ram in stock configuration does not seem like it would be a pleasant experience.

    Lord Evermore said:
    SHR is extremely flexible. If you make a small volume on the first drive, like 7TB, you could add an 8TB drive later on and mirror that 7TB, and you could also have a 5TB volume using that remaining space on the first drive, just with no mirroring. Of course that would be dumb as you'd be wasting all that space on the first drive, and adding another 12TB drive later would be cheaper than the original drive was as costs go down. That's not anything like your plan, just pointing out the flexibility.

    7TB would take quite a while to sync. Although the initial transfer might be pretty fast, it would get slower as the drive fills, due to the way mechanical drives work. If you assume a 125MBps average, then it would take almost 18 hours. (https://techinternets.com/copy_calc) There aren't any/many reviews of the WD Red series drives that I can find, with simple numbers about sustained transfers over such long periods, or at various positions on the drive platters. 210MBps is the maximum sustained according to WD's ratings for the 12TB Red I think, but on the inner platters you could see 20Mbps sustained, and on the midpoint it might be 90 to 120. So 125MBps for your 7TB would be just a ballpark and you could be looking at an entire day, or a good bit less than the 18 hours. Certainly at least going to need to let it go overnight. And of course if you are doing any file transfers during that time, it will slow down the sync.

    None of that takes into account inherent slowness of a RAID sync. It's always longer than a simple file copy would be. I would probably assume it's going to take at least 24 hours, assuming no other activity, if I was trying to make plans around it for some reason. Found one person on Reddit with a different model of NAS and drives that took 24 hours for 11TB.
    Click to expand...

    I wanted to order the second drive later, but honestly it sounds like its better to install both at the same time.

    Thank you for the information and showing the amount of time it would take for data to copy over to the second drive if it was installed at a later time.
     
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  • #21
    Area51Freak said:
    Thank you, I forgot to ask about ram compatibility. The amount ram in stock configuration does not seem like it would be a pleasant experience.
    Click to expand...
    All you're doing is letting it serve files and store camera videos (plus the services for the GUI). I'm sure the stock RAM is plenty for that and more. RAID1-style SHR and feeding files on a 1Gb LAN (even if you had both ports in use) aren't going to stress the memory capacity. Even if it runs at 90% RAM usage all the time, which it won't, it wouldn't matter. You don't need to have available memory for additional tasks once you've got the configuration done and have configured the cameras. (Using the Surveillance Station for the configurations might use a bit of RAM, when you're actually in the interface, but after that it should be zero, and I still doubt it would strain the stock RAM.)
     
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  • #22
    That's all true, but there's two reasons I upgraded the RAM in mine:

    1) Running the container with the controller for my network gear ate up a gig of RAM by itself, so I could easily see getting memory constrained if I end up adding another container or two, decide to get rid of my Eufy cameras and use the Surveillance Station, etc., and
    2) It's twenty bucks, so why not?
     
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  • #23
    Lord Evermore said:
    From what I read, SHR might be slightly lower performance, noticeable in benchmarks
    Click to expand...
    It shouldn't be; SHR is still just Linux mdadm behind the scenes. All it does is cleverly cut up your drives into "chunks" and RAID those. If you take SHR drives and plug them into a Linux box the volume should show right up. Honestly I'm kinda surprised Linux doesn't support something similar by now, it's a neat idea and extremely useful with no downsides that I've seen.
     
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  • #24
    Kyuu said:
    That's all true, but there's two reasons I upgraded the RAM in mine:

    1) Running the container with the controller for my network gear ate up a gig of RAM by itself, so I could easily see getting memory constrained if I end up adding another container or two, decide to get rid of my Eufy cameras and use the Surveillance Station, etc., and
    2) It's twenty bucks, so why not?
    Click to expand...
    What happened to me was I setup a NAS for video recording and back ups, then decided to setup an Omada controller since I had the NAS running. Now I'm looking at a HomeAssistant container to control lighting and log my geothermal system data. Every time I look I find some other useful thing you can stick in a container...
     
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  • #28
    rodalpho said:
    It shouldn't be; SHR is still just Linux mdadm behind the scenes. All it does is cleverly cut up your drives into "chunks" and RAID those. If you take SHR drives and plug them into a Linux box the volume should show right up. Honestly I'm kinda surprised Linux doesn't support something similar by now, it's a neat idea and extremely useful with no downsides that I've seen.
    Click to expand...
    I had not dug into it before, but it's not quite going to be able to read those RAID volumes if you just plug them into a Linux box. Synology does provide instructions to mount it but it also requires lvm2 to use vgchange for the volume groups. (Their instructions don't actually specify that you could mount a single drive from a 2-drive array, but I assume it would work. The instructions assume you have all the drives from the NAS and it was just the NAS itself that failed.) Even if there's only one actual volume, the extra metadata may still be there and be required with vgchange.

    The slight performance advantage of RAID1 is mentioned everywhere, and reportedly confirmed by Synology, but I can't find an actual page from Synology that says one way or another. You'd think they'd want to make it clear that there is no performance difference, if there wasn't, on the "what is SHR" page where they compare the two. I'd guess any performance difference just comes from the extra checking of the arrangement of the data since it might not be EXACTLY the same between two drives the way it would be with a pure RAID1, and it likely is extremely small. Maybe it would be noticeable if the CPU was already under heavy load and using SSDs. I really can't imagine there will be any effective difference on a 2-bay NAS using mechanical drives and a 1Gb network.
     
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  • #31
    Lord Evermore said:
    All you're doing is letting it serve files and store camera videos (plus the services for the GUI). I'm sure the stock RAM is plenty for that and more. RAID1-style SHR and feeding files on a 1Gb LAN (even if you had both ports in use) aren't going to stress the memory capacity. Even if it runs at 90% RAM usage all the time, which it won't, it wouldn't matter. You don't need to have available memory for additional tasks once you've got the configuration done and have configured the cameras. (Using the Surveillance Station for the configurations might use a bit of RAM, when you're actually in the interface, but after that it should be zero, and I still doubt it would strain the stock RAM.)
    Click to expand...

    Thank you.

    I was worried about that the ram would become a bottle neck since the DS224+ in its stock configuration comes with one single stick of 2GB of ram installed.
     
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  • #33
    I inItaly setup a 2016 era 4-bay Synology in SHR2 but found that that was probably overkill for me, so I moved it back to SHR. I don’t do much at all with my NAS it’s just there, working. I have a local USB backup and I also back up to Backblaze’s business offering. I used Amazon Glacier for years and that was also fine/cheap.

    I think that if you’re paying the Synology premium, then it’s OK to use their expertise and software…which means SHR (which is flexible and convenient), and even their editorial choice of BTRFS as a file system (some scary posts about BTRFS in the Linux Ars forum).
     
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  • #35
    Jeff3F said:
    I inItaly setup a 2016 era 4-bay Synology in SHR2 but found that that was probably overkill for me, so I moved it back to SHR. I don’t do much at all with my NAS it’s just there, working. I have a local USB backup and I also back up to Backblaze’s business offering. I used Amazon Glacier for years and that was also fine/cheap.

    I think that if you’re paying the Synology premium, then it’s OK to use their expertise and software…which means SHR (which is flexible and convenient), and even their editorial choice of BTRFS as a file system (some scary posts about BTRFS in the Linux Ars forum).
    Click to expand...

    The Synology DS244+ supports Btrfs and ext4.

    I have read that EXT4 is used primarily for security cameras and video editing. 

    EXT4 file system is less prone to fragmentation.

    Btrfs file system is less prone to bitrot.

    The Nas will be used for both a general media file storage and for storing security camera footage, playing back security camera footage and to viewlive security camera streaming.

    Do recommend Btrfs or ext4 for extended use of reading and writing to the drive, and stability?

    rodalpho said:
    BTRFS is fine too, so long as you don't use its built-in RAID functionality. Synology uses straight-up Linux mdadm.
    Click to expand...

    When formatting the drives to a Btrfs file system, would the Synology nas automatically configure the drives to use Brtfs build in raid functionality or does the Synology nas need to be setup to use this feature?
     
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  • #36
    Area51Freak said:
    When formatting the drives to a Btrfs file system, would the Synology nas automatically configure the drives to use Brtfs build in raid functionality or does the Synology nas need to be setup to use this feature?
    Click to expand...
    The RAID/SHR configuration would presumably be done first, then the array gets formatted with the chosen filesystem, even if the GUI makes it all "one-step". It doesn't sound like there IS any way within the system to make it use btrfs's own RAID functionality, since that would mean RAID1 or SHR are not used in the first place.

    I don't think the performance difference is going to be noticeable for your use to need ext4 compared to the benefits of btrfs. If you're hitting it with THAT many cameras you should be getting more drives or using SSDs, and the LAN is going to be the limiter in any case.
     
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  • #37
    Synology does not use btrfs's RAID functionality at all. It builds the RAID with mdadm then formats the filesystem btrfs.

    Definitely use btrfs. I could regurgitate but Synology has a great page talking about it.

    www.synology.com

    How Btrfs protects your company's data | Synology Inc.

    The next-generation file system Btrfs ensures a high level of data integrity while taking advantage of flexible, efficient data protection and recovery tools. Btrfs is available on selected Synology NAS models.
    www.synology.com www.synology.com
     
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  • #38
    I am far, far out of my depth and figure Synology’s default setup is likely OK in the setting of being properly backed up (or else we’d all hear about it)…but there are lots of technical considerations. And there may be different recommendations for specialty applications (like camera recording which is different enough that there are specialized hard drives for that activity).

    @Jim Salter wrote a front page piece on btrfs (Iink), and there is also a great albeit old thread here (link).
     
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  • #39
    That article is basically still current; btrfs is fine to use so long as you don't use its RAID functionality. I wouldn't use it on my plain-jane Linux systems, but Synology fully supports the filesystem and it does have major advantages over xfs and ext4.

    Linux filesystems are weird, btrfs's main original competitor reiserFS stopped development when its namesake was jailed for killing his wife. These days ZFS is the main competitor but it really isn't appropriate for non-enterprise use until they add raidZ expansion, which has been in development for what feels like eons and is perenially due for release "this year". And it is, supposedly 2024. At that point ZFS will be the clear winner for pretty much everybody.
     
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  • #40
    papadage said:
    My current two QNAP devices are OK for now. The one has a RAID six that just dropped a drive so it'll be the priority to migrate from.

    I am trying to decide if I should run a PLEX Docker container on the Synology once the data is migrated, keep my ancient SFF, or just get a little NUC-like PC for multiple VMs.
    Click to expand...
    Personally, I find that the Intel Celeron J4025 in my QNAP can serve 4K HDR videos just fine, but the experience is slow compared to the much older USFF PC (Lenovo M720 Tiny)I have that runs Plex.

    I have Plex running in a docker container on my QNAP in Unraid, and Plex running as the normal server install on my USFF. The Plex server running in the docker provides a much slower and sluggish browsing experience compared to that of the Plex server running natively on the USFF. It takes about 1.5 seconds for the Windows Plex server to show all of the tiles for the movies/TV shows; it takes about 10 seconds for the docker Plex server to show all o the tiles for the movies/TV shows.
     
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