Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by barclay 2331 days ago
(also a happy syno user here, been using it on several NAS's quite happily).

My rough understanding is synology did some pretty heavy modifications to btrfs in their implementation though... (a quick google finds me nothing to back this up, but i remember reading about it somewhere...)

1 comments

Not modifications per se, but it doesn't quite do the "normal" setup. Encryption is a mess (you can't export encrypted volumes via NFS), and the caching layer on top of it seems prone to corruption on the SSD (I've had my NVMe mirror cache drop twice over the last year and a half).

I'd like to see them move to full disk encryption rather then their current approach.

They do encryption/compression on subvolume level; each share you create is a separate subvolume.

For RAID5, they are using it on top of LVM, but with some modification - the synology implementation hooks LVM and btrfs together, so it gets ZFS-like properties.

There's a guy on the internet, who was playing around with it: https://daltondur.st/syno_btrfs_1/

So they have fixed the last big hurdle to btrfs adoption in the small (single node) NAS space and are just sitting on it (violating the GPL). I urge any Synology user to write them to send you the Linux kernel source then upload it somewhere... though, their last Linux kernel drop seems to have been in 2017, so not much hope there...