GoodBye Drobo, hello Synology

I love my Synology…After my Drobo started giving me trouble about 6 years ago, I made a decision to switch to Synology. Loving it ever since.

I’m starting to warm up to my DS918+.
Things that made it better:

  • Switched from Synology Drive to Resilio Sync
    • Recommended max of 500k files for Synology Drive is a little redic
  • Added 2x SSD cache drives

Be careful with read/write cache. Lot’s of reports with it corrupting volumes. I never had a problem, but I also found the write cache did nothing to help my perceived importance. So, I switched to just read cache. Be sure to have a UPS if you have a read/write cache.

I liked the Synology a lot but there are often several ways to achieve any one goal and it can be confusing as t which is “best”. I found the performance good, but not speed demons.

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So glad when I got rid of my Drobos. Went to a Pegasus concected to a Mac Mini server. I love it so far.

The Synology outperforms the Drobo. The Synology easily saturates the GBitE connection, while the Drobo 5N often was idling at ~30-40MB/s. I also set up prot trunking, so I always get the full GBitE, even when another client is running a backup or streaming is being done in the background.

Copy data:
I mounted the drives on my “server” Mac mini and used rsync to move the data. I had several volumes, so I just ran rsync on each of them. “rsync -avzh /volumes/source /volumes/destination” does the trick. The options are: -a for archive mode (preserves permissions, etc.), -v for verbose output, -z enables compression and -h (for “human”) shows file sizes in readable format. Just let it work in the background, as it will take a while.

The Drobo 5N still lives on as an additional backup device. I just changed the fan to make it silent.

On my computer and therefore in the backups, I have tons of personal data. Scans of my documents, bank records, contracts, photos, etc. If a device gets stolen, I want the data on it to be heavily encrypted.

A friend had a break-in in his appartment and all of his computer gear was stolen, including USB drives.

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Okay, that makes sense. You are concerned with someone picking up the backups and walking away with it. You want the data on the drives in that case to be useless. Got it :+1:

Exactly. Sidenote: it’s also GDRP-compliant.