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Just found one important difference between ds3615xs and ds3617xs, the former is "bromolow" architecture, while the latter is "broadwell" architecture, which means that since SynoCommunity packages must be recompiled for architecture and many have not yet been recompiled for the broadwell architecture, many SynoCommunity packages are unavailable on DS3617xs. Now hopefully it is just a matter of time but meanwhile, this limits SynoCommunity package access on 3617xs.

My recollection is there is a thread on the forums about generating a valid 3615xs SN, and your MAC just needs to have the right first 3 octets right, my understanding is that all Synology boxes have the same first 3 octets (MAC address is 6 octets). I used the SN gen for my 3615xs and made up the last 3 octets of my Mac and I haven't had any package install issues. OTOH I haven't installed a lot of the official Synology packages. Hmmm.

You're better off I think googling for this or using Synology's official forums. The concept of a Windows Domain (which is what I think you're talking about) in an Active Directory Domain is a Microsoft Windows Server thing as far as I know. So you'll want to google for "linux domain controller" since Synology is linux. It would not surprise me if this server function is restricted to licensed Windows Servers as this is how MS makes money. On the other hand a quick google does return some interesting stuff, like https://www.turnkeylinux.org/domain-controller (turnkeylinux.org/domain-controller) which supports Docker so could be run inside a Docker container on your Xpenology.

build-a-box GA Z77X-based system running Jun's 1.02b 3615xs loader has booted twice successfully so far without issue. I do see another forum post about possibly the 3617xs image is suffering a time bomb but it's too early to tell who's experiencing it and who is not yet.

There is at least one thread in the forum on this discussion: I personally use 3615 on a GA Z77X-UP4 TH board with a i7 CPU. My understanding is that use cases are different. There's some value in reviewing the official specs of these machines on Synology.com and choosing the system that most closely matches the hardware you're actually running, so that DSM features work as expected. I personally don't use most of the built-in features (for example, the 916 I think is optimized for transcoding if you use the DS Video app but I use Plex, which doesn't care what version of Synology box it's running on, it'll just use the hardware it has). You'll see some cosmetic stuff like hard-coded CPU cores and such in the UI that doesn't affect how the box runs. Then there's something about drivers included in each build. You can choose one and "migrate" to another (Synology will see it as moving the disks to new hardware) if you find you made the wrong choice.

My understanding is that this particular thread is way out of date. You're talking about Syno 5.2.x and Synology has released 6.1.x. I think the current xpenology loader is jun's 1.02b loader, you can see the guide here: https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/6253-dsm-6xx-loader/ @jun has actually released three images, mimicking ds3615, ds3617, and ds916, something like that. You should review the differences in the hardware so that it matches your build. In particular, I think the 916 has some built-in video transcoding support? But I use Plex so I used the 3615 image. There are threads on the forum comparing the builds. YMMV. 3615 may be the "safest" image to use if you're not sure. Choosing one is not the end, you can boot another and use the migrate tool to migrate your disks to what Syno thinks is a new box. As usual you burn the 1.02b loader to a USB stick, then you have to manually edit the grub.cfg file after determining your particular USB stick's VID and PID (links to tools to determine this info are in the post). You should also consider changing the serial number and Mac address, thoughts in the link. Each image has a valid default SN for that box but ideally you'll use a SN generator and roll your own. You should not use Synology's QuickConnect service, just use a free DDNS service. I don't understand fully the spoofing of the MAC address. Perhaps the Mac and SN need to be in sync. Plug the USB stick into your rig, boot to it, then use find.synology.com on your local network to download and install the pat. The stuff about serial and Mac address may apply to 5.2 but I don't know why you'd even go down the path of 5.2 if you have a rig that can do 6.1. jun solved 6.1 for us so it seems like a no-brainer.

I run baremetal, build-a-box Gigabyte mobo, Intel CPU, RAM and the WD Reds (there is a GPU plugged into the PCIE slot but it's not powered, my understanding is this mobo is a desktop model and requires a GPU but fortunately boots without having to actually output graphics, and of course the cpu has a GPU built in). I don't know what a hypervisor is, so I don't know if I use one. If that implies a VM, then no, I don't use a hypervisor.

Interesting. I see that Plex released GPU-based encoding as a Plex Pass feature earlier this year, and initially supported Intel GPUs only, YMMV with other GPUs. On my old xpenology box (a headless server) it used an older Intel CPU without an integrated (or discrete) GPU, but my current build-a-box has a recent Intel CPU with a built-in GPU. I'll have to investigate whether I can take advantage of it.

Right I said I wasn't a Plex expert and so I'm not, and I'm learning here. I did not know that Plex can only hardware transcode on a GPU. Most Plex Servers are running on machines without a GPU. Synology boxes don't have GPUs, server class machines generally don't, or don't have a GPU that would help much. So sounds like you're saying you're on hardware that does have a GPU and you don't know if Plex is using the GPU to transcode. That's way past what I know, maybe hit the Plex forums! Peace.

Thanks @NeoID I understand how you troubleshot the issue. Appreciate the follow-up. Every time I've had a drive go, I shut down, replace, boot up, repair, and it takes a single pass. I have experience on both ext4 RAID 5 and btrfs RAID 5. I still don't know what to make of 3 WD Reds going bad with < 1000 hours each on them. If I lose another drive I'll probably wipe the array and rebuild it as an ext4 RAID 5. I'm on a build-a-box with a Gigabyte mobo, Intel CPU, 6GB of good RAM, and the 4x3TB Reds on the SATA ports, so all good-quality stuff, not sure if there's some sort of weird bit swapping that could be causing bad sectors on the drives. Just don't know what to make of it, but to me the biggest culprit is the relatively new btrfs. Anyway. Peace.

You just need a dynamic dns provider. If you go to your Synology UI and to to Control Panel -> External Access, on the DDNS tab, click Add and drop down the Service provider selector to see a list of the ones Synology natively supports. Many have free tiers of service that allow you to register 1, 2 or 3 domain names to your external IP. So then the external WAN IP of your router becomes your IP address, but you will use the new domain name, say "mylovely.ddns.host". Going to that URL in a browser will redirect to your external IP. But that doesn't get you very far because your router doesn't allow inbound traffic on most ports. So then you'll need to access your router, go to Port Forwarding (which may be under external access, or firewall, and it may be under an advanced setting), and tell the router that if traffic comes in on port 80 (http), to forward it to port 80 of the Synology server, which is on an internal IP address, probably 192.168.1.19 or something. Then you need to open port 80 on the Synology firewall and have a server listening on port 80 (enable Web interface or install Apache or something). Badabing hit your domain and you'll see whatever your Synology serves on that port. Now you may want to not serve Synology's web ui on port 80, certainly that's not a great idea, since you log in to it. You should have already installed a certificate and be using https, maybe 443, maybe 5001. Let's say you're serving the web UI on port 5001 and you can hit your internal IP at that port (https://192.168.1.19:5001 or whatever) and get the web ui. Now you have to do the same thing: in the router, under port forwarding, tell it to forward port 5001 external to 192.168.1.19:5001 internal, and on the Synology box, open port 5001. Now you can hit "http://mylovely.ddns.host:5001" and get your Synology web ui from anywhere. Hopefully that's what you're looking for.

Can't really answer your question but on a related note, I've had 3 WD Red 3TB drives fail in the last 6 months with bad sectors, in a btrfs RAID 5 array. It seems impossible to believe that 3 drives went bad, they all have < 1000 hours on them. I've RMAed them back to WD so that's good. Meanwhile, I'm wondering if there is some issue with btrfs that's causing the bad sectors. I know, it seems unlikely. But I never had issues with ext4 RAID 5 arrays. Anyway, you say a bad cable crashed your btrfs volume, so now I'm wondering if I have a bad SATA cable. How would one tell? Although the drives that have failed have been across the array - disk 2 most recently, disk 1 before that, so that would see to eliminate a single bad SATA cable as the culprit. But tell me how did you diagnose a bad SATA cable?

The simple answer is, Plex transcodes. It's a transcoder, that's what it does. If your CPU is compatible, Plex is transcoding. Perhaps you want to know if it's transcoding a 20TB 4k rip of a movie down to a resolution more compatible for your device. You can go to the Plex Server UI and look at activity (under settings) to see what Plex is actually doing, or check the logs. It's my understanding that different devices can support any number of formats natively and this information is passed to Plex, which may decide not to bother to transcode. For example, you have a 720p mpeg4 that can be played natively, and you're playing it on a 480p screen. Plex may just pass the stream down and let the device "transcode". That's more about the settings that the device provides to Plex via the client software. You can go into the client app, and set how high a quality you want, effectively telling Plex to give you a lower than native resolution for the purposes of saving bandwidth. You might also just google for how to tell if Plex is transcoding a particular file for a particular device. But in general, yes, Plex is transcoding unless you've told it via a setting somewhere not to, and your device can accept the native stream. I'm not a Plex expert, but this is my understanding.

totenkopf4 thank you so much for replying, and for the detail. I am aware of the SMART tests and I do use them but was more infrequent. On my DS410 I have 4x2TB WD Reds with 10s of thousands of hours of them, each, no issues. On this xpenology system I have 4x3TB WD Reds and most are almost brand new with < 1000 hours. So for example I recently had an issue with disk 3, couple weeks ago it reported I/O errors, but it now seems normal. With the drives I replaced I was getting bad sectors reported. So on disk 3, I see load cycle count, as follows: value: 200 worst: 200 threshold: 0 status: OK raw data: 67 I have no idea how to interpret that but I'll start googling. On disk1, which is brand new, for load cycle count I see 200/200/0/OK/21, so the only difference is "raw data". On disk4, my "oldest" drive in this system, I see 200/200/0/OK/845, again, only difference being in raw data column. I need to research this. I certainly understand that drives have firmware which regulates their behavior, should I look for ways to "tune" the behavior? I would think that Synology would have figured that part out. I had 3TB Reds in my other xpenology box with thousands of hours a piece on them no issues. moved them to this box and reinitialized from an ext4 raid5 to a btrfs raid5 and the drives keep failing, weird. I'll look at that link and look at doing WD diagnostics. I understand what you say about btrfs using different timeouts. As far as I know bad sectors is not a timeout-related thing? Very frustrated by this recent experience. Thanks again.

I've had a mixture of WD Red drives in a Syno DS410 and an Intel SSE4200 enclosure running Xpenology for years with very few drive issues. Recently I thought I'd repurpose an Intel box I'd built a few years ago but was just sitting there (CPU/RAM/MOBO) and successfully set it up with 4x3TB WD Red drives running Xpenology. When given the choice, I chose to create a btrfs RAID 5 volume. But. In the 5 or so months I've been running this NAS, three drives have crashed and started reporting a bunch of bad sectors. These drives have less than 1000 hours on them, practically new. Fortunately they are under warranty at some level. But, still, wondering, could this be btrfs? I'm no file system expert. Light research suggests that while btrfs has been around for several years and of course is a supported option in Synology, some feel it isn't ready for prime time. I'm at a loss to explain why 3 WD Red drives with less than 1000 hours on them manufactured on different dates are failing so catastrophically. I understand btrfs and bad sectors are not really in the same problem zone; software shouldn't be able to cause hardware faults. I considered heat but these drives are rated at 65 celsius and they are not going above 38 or so. If it matters, when drives fail, the drive always reports problems at boot up; in fact, as the volume is now degraded with the loss of yet another drive I'm just not turning the system off until I get a new drive in there; one of the remaining drives reported failure to start up properly in the past week. Final consideration I have is that this is a build-a-box using a Gigabyte motherboard and 4 drives on the SATA bus in AHCI mode. Some sort of random hardware issue in this system could possibly be causing bad sectors to be reported on the drives?? Seems unlikely. Has anyone ever heard of SynologyOS reporting bad sectors when there weren't actually bad sectors? Anyone have any thoughts on this? Should I go back to ext4? This is mainly a plex media server.

So this is really the sort of thing you should educate yourself on and make the best decision for yourself on. I personally went with btrfs, and there are a number of advantages. ext4 is the "4" release superseding ext3, superseding ext2, etc. and so it has that "tried and true" quality. btrfs is the new shiny file system and has a number of technical advantages over ext4, one of the immediate ones being you can create a RAID5 volume from fewer minimum disks than ext4. Maybe read up on it. I suppose one standpoint is, Synology wouldn't release btrfs support if they didn't feel very confident in it. That's the risk, right, that the file system will somehow not protect your data, which seems to be mitigated by Synology supporting it. But that doesn't mean it's right for you. Cheers.

Just reporting that jun's 1.02b loader and the latest 3617xs pat works fine for me on bare metal, a GA X58A-UD3R mobo with 6GB RAM and an i7-930 CPU. Wrote the image to the stick, changed the vid/pid/sn/MAC (sn using sn generator, MAC using standard Syno first 8 and random last 4) and changed sataportmap to 6, booted, find.synology.com, profit. Thanks for the hard work!

Ok I used a linux livecd to reset the disks (gparted utility), set the SATA controller to AHCI mode, booted jun's 1.01 in "reinstall" mode and it all worked. Coulda saved myself some time if I had it in AHCI mode first.

I should have mentioned I'm using jun's 1.01 loader with a saved copy of the 6.0 8451 3615xs pat that I have running on my other xpenology bare metal. After looking through the forum it seems the SATA control mode should be AHCI. I did try RAID and IDE. However, even in AHCI mode, I'm in a "Recover" loop. No matter what I choose on the xpenology loader screen (vanilla, install, force install), find.synology.com reports a DS that can be recovered, I get one option to Recover, it briefly installs something and reboots the xpenology, and if I hit find.synology.com again, it says the exact same thing. Do I need to consider wiping the two HDs in the box? I'm a little stuck on options or what the problem is. Thanks.

Hi, been using xpenology for many years on baremetal (and have a real syno DS410). Recently thought I'd give an old build-a-box a go, it's on a GA X58A-UD3R. Main question is, in the BIOS, I have an "ICH SATA Control Mode" which IIRC has values "IDE", "AHCI" or "RAID", and "SATA Port0-3 Native Mode" with values "Enabled" or "Disabled". The tip for Disabled says something about legacy IDE so I set that to Enabled. Does anyone have guidance on these settings? This mobo has 3 SATA (and one eSATA) interfaces: South Bridge (6xSATA 3Gb/s supporting RAID 0/1/5/10), Marvell 9128, and GA SATA2 chip, but I've disabled the Marvell and the GA SATA connectors in the BIOS. I don't really understand how Syno RAID works, I assume there has to be an Intel South Bridge driver on the xpenology stick but after that I don't understand how the Synology OS builds the RAID, if it uses it's own software or uses the ROM on the mobo or what. So far I set the control mode to IDE and Synology Assistant seems to install the OS OK, but I'm concerned it won't build the RAID right. Thanks.

My understanding is that Plex releases updates faster than Synology tests and certifies them. But you should always be fine manually installing the spk from the Plex site. So you have two options, upgrade if/when Synology releases an update through the official channel, or, periodically log in to your Plex server and go to the configuration area and notice if there is a link that says that an update is available (it'll be a hyperlink). I do the latter. Click the link, download the spk, and use the Synology interface to manually install the spk. If something were to happen you could uninstall and reinstall the Synology official Plex package I guess (it won't hurt your library I don't think), but I've never had an issue.

Just to be clear, is the RAM usage at 25-35%, or is the CPU usage at 25-35%? Those are two different things. The first tells you how many programs/daemons etc. are running and the extent to which your memory is being utilized. You would expect memory to be consumed at some relatively fixed percentage once your services are all started up. When your RAM/memory usage starts to exceed a certain threshold (say 80%) the OS will start paging to disk, which will result in the system responding slowly while the paging occurs. 25-35% RAM usage is not out of the ordinary. CPU usage at 25-35% is the amount of CPU cycles being used to execute those services. Again, 25-35% CPU usage is not out of the ordinary especially if the system is starting up. But as others have said, it should idle back to close to 0 CPU soon. You could use the top command or similar GUI utility to determine what services/programs/daemons are consuming CPU cycles. Services such as video services which automatically transcode video from one format to another (if you use a video service) could be consuming resources. You should also consider simple network lag; if your request can't get to the syno box quickly and the response doesn't come back quickly that could be it, you could use ping and tracert commands to make sure your network is efficient. Are you using an internally recognized name such as the IP, or are you using a DDNS name? If you're using a DDNS name then your request may be going out to the public internet and back; try using the ip address of the box (192.168.1.2) instead of the DDNS name (my.synobox.noip.com). Turn off your bittorrent clients. If the slowness continues after removing some of these potential bottlenecks try turning off any packages/services and see if it helps.

I used the SN and mac visible on my xpen NAS running 5.2. Before I updated anything, I went to the 5.2 GUI and went to the about or whatever tab, and copied down my existing SN and mac address. The SN will look like "CJ003N000" and the mac is something like 01:02:4F:32:01:02. In the grub.cfg, just replace serial number with your old serial number, and replace mac with your real mac (but omit the colons). Another way to go is use the Synology Assistant app on your computer to find the box; in that UI it will show you the SN and mac address. Or as others have said you can generate a new SN. But I think mac is sort of hard-set on your NIC, you want to use your NIC's actual mac. Another way to find the mac address would be via your router UI: look at the devices on your network, find the one that is the NAS, and note the mac address that way.

As far as I knew, this was a thing you used to have to do in the early 5.x days but have long since _not_ needed to do, but I could be totally wrong. I thought once you got into 6 simply using the GUI to push-button update was all you needed. Anyone else confirmation one way or the other?

manwald, look in the forum for polanskiman's tutorial thread: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=22100. The first post in that thread is really all you need. It walks you through creating the loader stick with jun's 1.01 loader, identifying your stick's vid/pid, editing the grub.cfg on the stick (after mounting the stick's EFI partition) to set the right vid/pid/serial number/mac address (use the serial number and mac address from your 5.2 box), and updating to 6 on your NAS. One caution from personal experience is that I tried the migration path several times and couldn't get the GUI to come back up, so I just did clean install and it went perfect. I don't use my box for much, rsync and Plex, but I can confirm those work well, and I haven't run into anything that doesn't work. Folks report that the latest update 4 installs without issue from the GUI. About the main gotcha is if your boxes NIC isn't supported by a built-in driver. In that case you're stuck unless you know how to add the driver. For me on a bare metal Intel SS4200-E the hardware was supported OOB.