Intel Pentium D1508 was launched in Q4 2015, WTF. How is this DS3018xs a brand new line? They should have used a Gemini Lake or Coffee Lake CPU for 4K x265 HEVC 10-bit transcode to 1080p, fail.
Meanwhile all their Atom C2538 based units are failing at a rapidly increasing rate and their "fix" is to refurbish the affected units with a resistor that *should* make the CPU last long enough until the warranty expires. Current RMA time 4 weeks or more.
Just check the forums to see how many people reported failed DS1515+/1815+ in the past weeks...
While I agree that continuing to use the C2000 series is a bad choice, I do not think that 'refurbishing affected units with a resistor should make the CPU last long enough till warranty expires'. The reason is: once the unit is affected, the internal transistor is kaput. There is no way they can bring it back. If they have a older board that has NOT been subject to 24x7 operation / powered on rarely, the transistor is not degraded. The resistor workaround will prevent the damage to the internal transistor. I believe almost all of the RMAs for the C2000-based units should be because of the boot-fail issue. And, I am sure they will not have enough boards from the other RMAs to use for replacing the ones that come in due to the boot-fail. It is more likely that the resistor workaround is applied to boards that were manufactured earlier, but never shipped (or powered on for extended duration).
This is my reading of the situation. If you have additional insights, please do share.
I don't have any additional information, I'm just a somewhat disappointed costumer as our small business relies on a DS1515+ for smooth day-to-day operation and we're about to wait a whole month to receive a unit with the same B0 stepping and a board level fix that looks somewhat questionable to me as a layman. I am going to have to order a replacement device before the RMA and use the 1515+ as a cold spare unit.
If you say the resistor modification is sound from an engineering perspective and the CPU will last as long as a C0-stepping with the silicon fix then all is fine. Synology is being very opaque about the whole situation, possibly because of various NDA contracts with their supplier. Tech publications seem to have forgotten about this issue since it first became public last year.
Wow, as I was reading the article, I was kicking myself yet again for buying the DS1515 instead of the DS1515+ just to save a bit of money.. But now I feel totally relieved. So thanks for that. ... My condolences to all those affected by this issue of coarse.
No plug in NAS can beat a properly configured FreeNAS. This is especially true when you want a full media serving solution. I can transcode 4k in real time off of a pair of x5600 series Xeons. Good luck just attempting to transcode 720p on most of the big name NAS products.
An x5600 rack system can be had cheaply - price is not what wins here, power consumption, noise and form-factor. There are a lot of advantages of the older rack-system approach if noise and form-factor don't matter. Intel's artificial cadence of IPC improvements has left an ocean of rather capable hardware in its wake.
>No plug in NAS can beat a properly configured FreeNAS.
Except in WAF. Or ease of use for non-techies. Or simple replacement of drives. Or migration of drives in the event of a hardware failure. Or price. Or price/performance. Or speed of configuration. Or noise. Or power consumption. etc, etc.
Yes, a properly configured FreeNAS box will outperform a plug-in NAS, in general, but "beating" implies you only care about performance and not any of the other things which make plug-in NASes worthwhile.
I wouldn't want my small business customers to have to figure out how to admin a FreeNAS box in order to have a place to dump their backups. Nor would I want to hammer them with my time costs in order to configure it for them. Why not? Because then they wouldn't bother backing up, and then when it all goes base-over-apex you know who'll get the blame.
Cheap, quick and easy to configure, and acceptable performance - that's all you need in the vast majority of cases.
if you are technically included, you are actually using your knowledge as added value, and while the word Free in FreeNAS does refer to product and that you can Freely use it, it's not Free however when it comes down to out of the box PROPER configuration. Which requires time and knowledge, neither of which comes "for free".
That is the main drawback of these type of things. Most of its locked down to approved apps. While normally that is good, the problem is that lots of them won't get updated often. I was looking into them for media streaming basicly and simple file sharing. For the price it was not worth it, i just put together a cheap NAS with windows home server and did everything perfectly.
Still requires a BTRFS volume to do a DSM instance? BTW Synology Dockviewer is a container behind the scenes. Reason I asked is because while Synology does a good job keeping the official apps up. Their app selection till containers came along was poor compared to other NAS. Unofficial was even worse.
The output of uname -a on an updated DSM system: 3.10.102 #15217 SMP Wed Dec 20 18:19:08 CST 2017 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I had hoped (incorrectly, it seems) they were patching these since they can be VM hosts. RHEL 7.x is on 3.10.6xx with patches for specter/meltdown. Their comment makes it sound otherwise which makes them insecure for use as a VM-host. The last thing you'd want is having a compromised guest get out of its container and on to the host where your primary data store lives... That's nuts...
sadly in its current form it's pretty much useless if you are already using your Synology setup with multiple people.
the upload and auto upload feature will go to each person personal album you can share albums between users, that is not bad but existing Photo Station photos are completely ignored, no easy way to have one shared Photo system.
looking forward to new features and additions, as the Moments and Drive applications allow for your own personal easy accessible mini cloud solution :)
Wow, not only does the RS818+/RS818RP+ come with a CPU from 2013, but it also starts out with only 2GB of memory if you don't expand it. At well over $800 and $1200 respectively it's kind of a joke.
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Jake13942 - Thursday, January 18, 2018 - link
Intel Pentium D1508 was launched in Q4 2015, WTF. How is this DS3018xs a brand new line? They should have used a Gemini Lake or Coffee Lake CPU for 4K x265 HEVC 10-bit transcode to 1080p, fail.ydeer - Thursday, January 18, 2018 - link
Meanwhile all their Atom C2538 based units are failing at a rapidly increasing rate and their "fix" is to refurbish the affected units with a resistor that *should* make the CPU last long enough until the warranty expires. Current RMA time 4 weeks or more.Just check the forums to see how many people reported failed DS1515+/1815+ in the past weeks...
https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=106...
ganeshts - Thursday, January 18, 2018 - link
While I agree that continuing to use the C2000 series is a bad choice, I do not think that 'refurbishing affected units with a resistor should make the CPU last long enough till warranty expires'. The reason is: once the unit is affected, the internal transistor is kaput. There is no way they can bring it back. If they have a older board that has NOT been subject to 24x7 operation / powered on rarely, the transistor is not degraded. The resistor workaround will prevent the damage to the internal transistor. I believe almost all of the RMAs for the C2000-based units should be because of the boot-fail issue. And, I am sure they will not have enough boards from the other RMAs to use for replacing the ones that come in due to the boot-fail. It is more likely that the resistor workaround is applied to boards that were manufactured earlier, but never shipped (or powered on for extended duration).This is my reading of the situation. If you have additional insights, please do share.
ydeer - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
I don't have any additional information, I'm just a somewhat disappointed costumer as our small business relies on a DS1515+ for smooth day-to-day operation and we're about to wait a whole month to receive a unit with the same B0 stepping and a board level fix that looks somewhat questionable to me as a layman. I am going to have to order a replacement device before the RMA and use the 1515+ as a cold spare unit.If you say the resistor modification is sound from an engineering perspective and the CPU will last as long as a C0-stepping with the silicon fix then all is fine. Synology is being very opaque about the whole situation, possibly because of various NDA contracts with their supplier. Tech publications seem to have forgotten about this issue since it first became public last year.
reckless76 - Thursday, January 18, 2018 - link
Wow, as I was reading the article, I was kicking myself yet again for buying the DS1515 instead of the DS1515+ just to save a bit of money.. But now I feel totally relieved. So thanks for that....
My condolences to all those affected by this issue of coarse.
NightShade00013 - Thursday, January 18, 2018 - link
No plug in NAS can beat a properly configured FreeNAS. This is especially true when you want a full media serving solution. I can transcode 4k in real time off of a pair of x5600 series Xeons. Good luck just attempting to transcode 720p on most of the big name NAS products.Hurr Durr - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
Any plug-in NAS will utterly destroy your "pair of Xeons" on price, which is what actually matters.cekim - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
An x5600 rack system can be had cheaply - price is not what wins here, power consumption, noise and form-factor. There are a lot of advantages of the older rack-system approach if noise and form-factor don't matter. Intel's artificial cadence of IPC improvements has left an ocean of rather capable hardware in its wake.mkaibear - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
>No plug in NAS can beat a properly configured FreeNAS.Except in WAF. Or ease of use for non-techies. Or simple replacement of drives. Or migration of drives in the event of a hardware failure. Or price. Or price/performance. Or speed of configuration. Or noise. Or power consumption. etc, etc.
Yes, a properly configured FreeNAS box will outperform a plug-in NAS, in general, but "beating" implies you only care about performance and not any of the other things which make plug-in NASes worthwhile.
I wouldn't want my small business customers to have to figure out how to admin a FreeNAS box in order to have a place to dump their backups. Nor would I want to hammer them with my time costs in order to configure it for them. Why not? Because then they wouldn't bother backing up, and then when it all goes base-over-apex you know who'll get the blame.
Cheap, quick and easy to configure, and acceptable performance - that's all you need in the vast majority of cases.
jmke - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
this right here^if you are technically included, you are actually using your knowledge as added value, and while the word Free in FreeNAS does refer to product and that you can Freely use it, it's not Free however when it comes down to out of the box PROPER configuration. Which requires time and knowledge, neither of which comes "for free".
time is money friend.
jmke - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
* technically inclined (autocorrect be damned!)c155695 - Tuesday, March 6, 2018 - link
Gemini Lake can do the same at a fraction of the cost (power and money).Threska - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
Wonder if these apps are container based behind the scenes? Also the FS1018 is where I see things headed for several reasons including size.imaheadcase - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
That is the main drawback of these type of things. Most of its locked down to approved apps. While normally that is good, the problem is that lots of them won't get updated often. I was looking into them for media streaming basicly and simple file sharing. For the price it was not worth it, i just put together a cheap NAS with windows home server and did everything perfectly.jmke - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
Synology is pretty good with keeping their in-house applications up to date.nirolf - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
Not only that, but you now have Docker available with plenty of images already configured and ready to go, maintained by 3rd parties.Threska - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
Still requires a BTRFS volume to do a DSM instance? BTW Synology Dockviewer is a container behind the scenes. Reason I asked is because while Synology does a good job keeping the official apps up. Their app selection till containers came along was poor compared to other NAS. Unofficial was even worse.cekim - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
The output of uname -a on an updated DSM system:3.10.102 #15217 SMP Wed Dec 20 18:19:08 CST 2017 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I had hoped (incorrectly, it seems) they were patching these since they can be VM hosts. RHEL 7.x is on 3.10.6xx with patches for specter/meltdown. Their comment makes it sound otherwise which makes them insecure for use as a VM-host. The last thing you'd want is having a compromised guest get out of its container and on to the host where your primary data store lives... That's nuts...
jmke - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
"Moments" is an excellent initiative !sadly in its current form it's pretty much useless if you are already using your Synology setup with multiple people.
the upload and auto upload feature will go to each person personal album
you can share albums between users, that is not bad
but existing Photo Station photos are completely ignored, no easy way to have one shared Photo system.
looking forward to new features and additions, as the Moments and Drive applications allow for your own personal easy accessible mini cloud solution :)
DavidJr. - Friday, January 19, 2018 - link
Wow, not only does the RS818+/RS818RP+ come with a CPU from 2013, but it also starts out with only 2GB of memory if you don't expand it. At well over $800 and $1200 respectively it's kind of a joke.tuxRoller - Saturday, January 20, 2018 - link
It's always great to see companies which contribute back to the tree having such success.