I was born in Brooklyn, to Yiddish speaking parents and Yiddish was my first language. I now spend half my time in California and half in Israel. The accent checker said 80% American English, 16% Spanish, and 4% Brazilian Portuguese. In Israel they ask if I’m Russian when I speak Hebrew. In the US, people ask where I’m from all the time because my accent—and especially my grammar—is odd. The accent checker doesn’t look for grammatical oddities but that’s where a lot of my “accent” comes from.
One think that concerns me with Tesla FSD (and I use it every day in my Plaid) is the transition between FSD on and off. Sometimes I catch myself forgetting to steer or slow down because I just switched it off to get off an exit early, etc. and my mind hasn’t switched modes along with it.
You can build a little hot-swappable NAS with nice trays to slide disks in and out, an easy web GUI, front panel status lights, support for applications like surveillance cameras, etc, with junk you mostly already owned?
I don't think most people consider easy hot-swaps + front panel status lights particularly key features in their home NAS.
I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage.
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As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC hardware from the past 5-10 years.
It's hard to directly compare non-identical products.
For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up.
It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for everything.
Hot swap for drives is a must on a NAS. If you have to power it down to swap out a drive there is a chance that your small problem becomes a larger one. Better to replace the drive immediately and have the NAS do the rebuild without a powercycle.
If you're worried the hard drives won't spin back up, I'd say you should instead spin them down regularly so you know that risk is basically zero. If you're worried the power supply will explode and surge into the drives when you turn it on, you should not be using that power supply at all. Any other risks to powering it down?
And for the particular issue of replacing a failed drive and not wanting to open up the case while it's powered, you can get a single drive USB enclosure to "hot swap" for $20. And if you use hard drives you should already have one of those laying around, imo.
Agree, you should consider replacing your drives on your primary server (backup servers we can debate) as soon as you start seeing the first SMART problems, like bad sectors. If you do regular data scrubbing, and none of these problems show up on the other drives, I'd argue the risk that they fail simultaneously is fairly low.
Hot swap drives are necessary on data centers where you don't want to have to pull the whole server and open the top cover just to replace a disk.
But on a home NAS? What problem would having to power it down and power it on for drive replacement create? You're going to resync the array anyways.
I don't mind them and I do use them but I consider them a very small QOL improvement. I don't really replace my disks all that often. And now that you can get 30TB enterprise samsung SSDs for 2k, two of those babies in raid 1 + an optane cache gives you extremely fast and reliable storage in a very small footprint.
No, I've seen this happen on larger arrays. The restart with a degraded array risks another drive not coming up and then you are on very thin ice. Powercycles are usually benign but they don't have to be and on an array there is a fair chance that all of the drives are equally old and if one dies there may be another that is marginal but still working. Statistically unlikely but I have actually seen this in practice so I'm a bit wary of it. The larger the array the bigger the chance. This + the risk of controller failure is why my backup box is using software RAID 6. It definitely isn't the fastest but it has the lowest chance of ever losing the whole thing. I've seen a hardware raid controller fail as well and that was a real problem. For one it was next to impossible to find a replacement and for another when the replacement finally arrived it would not recognize the drives.
In fact I find the synology disk trays to be very fragile. Out of the 48 trays I have, I think a good 6 or 7 do not close anymore unless you lock them with a key. A common problem apparently.
Sure. You buy a chinese case with 6-8 bays off Aliexpress, throw some board with ECC RAM support into it and a few disks. You install TrueNAS Scale on it, setup a OpenZFS pool. Front panel lights are controllable via Kernel [0], it even offers a ready-made disk-activity module if you want to hack. Surveillance cameras are handled by Frigate, an open source NVR Software which works really well.
Especially when you want to build and learn, there's next to no reason to buy a Synology.
Very valid advice, but you don't do all that in "an hour," of course. Synology's purpose in life is to provide a solution to users who are more interested in the verbs than the nouns.
They are the Apple of the NAS industry, a role that has worked out really well for Apple as well as for most of their users. The difference is, for all their rent-seeking walled-garden paternalism, Apple doesn't try to lock people out of installing their own hard drives.
Kudos to Synology for walking back a seriously-stupid move.
Once you have the case, an hour or two is pretty reasonable... you can even have your boot device pre-imaged while waiting on the case to get delivered.
Not to mention the alternative brands that allow you to run your own software... I've got a 4-bay TerraMaster (F-424 Pro) as a backup NAS. I don't plan on buying another Synology product.
I'm no stranger to building boxes or running servers, but I've run a couple of different Synology NAS over the past 15 years. My estimate is that if I were to put together my own system, it would probably take several days and cost about the same as if I were to buy Synology. I'm not familiar with building NAS systems specifically, so that might be part of the issue. But saying you can do it in one hour seems like hyperbole.
When I looked into it last, I planned to spend about as much as a Synology, but it would have much more compute, memory and as much storage. I was likely going to run ProxMox as a primary OS, and pass the SATA controller(s) to a TruNAS Scale VM... Alternatively, just run everything in containers under TruNAS directly.
For my backup NAS, I wound up going with a TerraMaster box and loading TruNAS Scale on it.
Someone building their own probably isn't too afraid of missing out on a webgui or installing something like FreeNAS or whatever is the popular choice these days.
I think the NAS market is in for an upheaval due to the markups for fairly crappy hardware and then squeezed from the bottom by cloud storages.
RPI 5 can be got with 16gb of memory and has a PCI-E port, some might complain about the lack of ECC ram but does all those cheap ARM cpu's on lower end NAS'es really have that?
I think the biggest factor might be that case manufacturers haven't found it to be a high enough margin, but it only takes one to decide that they want to take a bite out of the enthusiast NAS market.
In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to find. The software is probably already on github. The toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.
they’re pretty clearly referring to _their_ use case and not everyone’s. i think people are mostly talking past each other about this. there isn’t one feature set that matters for everyone, so of course a synology is perfect for some and for others it can be replaced with “junk”.
There are several drive tray cases for ITX and mATX that you can choose from. As for a Web GUI, you can get TruNAS Scale running relatively easily and there are other friendly options as well... so yes.
I'm not parent and Windows 11 is my least favourite desktop OS, but there are some things where I prefer Windows to Mac OS, for example multi monitor user experience, or the way full screen windows work (F11) and the ease of maximising windows without having to double click on the title bar. Also I like the way home/end/pgup/pgdown keys work. I much prefer how it renders text on non hidpi screeens. Finally I like how there is only one taskbar and no top bar, which results in more real estate on small displays.
Some Linux DEs also do these things well BTW. In fact I use Linux for most things at home. (I use Mac at work and my only Win device left is used exclusively for gaming).
> Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels.
Hey, so I'm a different user, and I wouldn't claim it's the best desktop OS, but split between macOS/Windows for desktop use, there are definitely things about Windows I appreciate. Off the top of my head:
* It has pretty approachable "config as code" built-in - with "winget configure" and some yaml files, you can define the apps you want, the Windows config, the registry settings, etc. without the overhead of MDM or something like Ansible.
* UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)
> UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)
We can't be using the same windows. At work we have 27" 5k displays which I use at 200%, so a perfect multiple of the usual 100% I use everywhere else. The screen is blurry 99% of the time. The only reliable way to get it sharp is to boot the PC with the screen attached. Of course, if I go to the toilet and the screen turns off, when I come back it's just like hot-plugging it: a blurry mess.
Apparently, updating the graphics driver also works, so I suppose it's enough to restart just that instead of the whole OS. Don't know how to do that, though. The resolution is reported as the correct one, changing scaling options doesn't help. 100% looks sharp enough, but it's unusable for me.
And I don't use any old app, it's mostly new outlook and edge. But even the start menu is blurry! There's also the fact that afterwards, tray icons' menus tend to appear in random places, but I understand that apps draw those, so I guess this isn't completely windows' fault.
My work machine dual-boots Linux, which is what I actually daily drive, and these screens have pushed me to switch to Wayland. Now there are some rough edges there, but the high-dpi is handled perfectly (same setup as windows: everything 100% except for that one screen at 200%). This is using Sway and mainly Firefox, Chromium and Alacaritty. Native GTK apps seem to work fine, too, but I don't use many of those.
edit: not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.
> edit: not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.
200% scaling works if you only want "looks like 1920x1080", but if you have a 27" 4K display, I'd typically want "looks like 2560x1440" or 150% scaling - if you do that on macOS, the desktop is rendered at 5120x2880 and then downscaled to 3840x2160. So you're getting both higher resource draw from rendering the desktop at a higher resolution and losing pixel-perfect rendering.
It won't be a problem for most people, but it's enough of a problem for me that I won't use macOS with scaled displays.
>The screen is blurry 99% of the time. The only reliable way to get it sharp is to boot the PC with the screen attached.
That sounds like a (graphics driver) bug. It's not something I ever experienced on Windows 10, even when occasionally connecting an additional display set to 150% scaling. I believe you, though, bugs do happen.
>not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.
I think his point is that on macOS you pretty much have to use 200%, whereas on Windows it can be any value (though multiples of 25% are recommended).
It wouldn't surprise me, although this is a bog-standard-fare enterprise laptop, a 5 year-old full Intel affair. No dedicated GPU or anything fancy.
But, for a long time, I had weird issues with display output on Windows. It would refuse to output 4k@60Hz without doing a stupid plug-unplug-replug-just-at-the-right-time dance, even though it worked on Linux. It took a good 3 years for that to work reliably.
And, in the beginning, those 5k screens only worked at 4k for some reason. Again, no issue on Linux.
But when any of the above situations happened, the state was actually correctly reported, as in 4k@30 Hz, or the 5k screen running at 4k. That's not the case now, everything says what it should, but the image is not sharp.
That's the only situation where I use Windows with scaling, so don't have any easy way of figuring which component is broken. All I can say is that the hardware itself seems to work fine.
I like windows 11 family settings. I can let my kids play Minecraft on old corporate castaway Dells, which I setup from bios/pe to do a clean reinstall. Then I can manage screen time limits and content restrictions from an app on my phone. All free.
Sort of, but with similar limitations: The App Store, iCloud syncing, iMessage, FaceTime, and other Apple online services are unavailable unless an Apple ID is used.
The difference is that you need a Microsoft account to login in your computer. On macOS an Apple account is require for some services, not to manage the computer user login.
> Sort of, but with similar limitations: The App Store, iCloud syncing, iMessage, FaceTime, and other Apple online services are unavailable unless an Apple ID is used.
And you get an impossible-to-remove notification from the Settings app.
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