> "it is trying to protect the hard drives and data through fires of up to 1550F for 30 minutes and 10 feet of water for up to 72 hours."
Trying. It does not look fire proof to me, especially the power supply. Did they ever tried to submerge it in a pool for 72 hours. They forgot to say also if those specs are operating or nonoperating.
The review seems quite clear on that point, even from the line you quoted. It's protecting the hard drives, not the NAS. The electronics (including the external power supply) are not encased in the safe are -- only the drives are.
> The concept is more that one can pull the drives out, put them in another Synology NAS, and be up and running quickly after a fire.
Even if you do that you should never rely on those drives longer than it takes to pull the data off. And even then I'd advocate for an off-site mirror rather than to rely on drives surviving any kind of fire.
During a fire even a "fire safe" will reach extremely high temperatures. The goal of the box is to keep the internal temperature below 800 degrees (the autoignition point of paper). I can't imagine the internals of the NAS actually surviving above 200 or so degrees, especially given the fact there is less insulation than a standard fire safe.
A much better option would be to buy a gun safe from Costco or the like with a large internal volume and ethernet/power passthrough ports. The air inside will act as an additional insulating layer buying you time.
Well, no. Actually it's a bit more variable than that, but "Between Fahrenheight 424 and Fahrenheight 475" doesn't make as punchy a book title for some reason.
Paper has an autoignition (spontaneous combustion) temperature of 842 °F (450 °C) and a flash point (set alight by static) at 662 °F (350 °C). Either way, both temperatures are much higher than 451 °F (233 °C)—books don’t catch fire at this temperature.
I can't see 30 minutes of fire protection being all that useful in a big fire.
The Curie temp of hard drives seems to be quite low, depending on the exact platter formulation. A target temp of ~800C is far too high. In a hot fire, I wouldn't expect the data to last more than 10-15 mins,
72 hrs of water protection might be enough.
But this still makes less sense than keeping copies of data off-prem somewhere - preferably a very very long way away.
And preferably multiple copies.
There may be reasons (privacy, security...) why you might not want to do that. But still. An encrypted off-prem solution, even if it's multiple NAS boxes in various offices and not a cloud thing, is going to be far more robust than a drive safe.
If the nas is deployed in a building with a good fire suppression system, a 30-minute rating may be sufficient for it to survive long enough to allow for the system to activate. At that point, it may be sitting drenched for quite a while before people go in to recover it.
But from a cursory read, it seems they are mostly interested in ensuring only the spinning disks are safe (the SSDs are outside the sealed box, with the board).
I don't understand how you review a fireproof NAS without putting it in a fire. The one thing I would want to know about a device like this is how effective it is at protecting the drives- find a burn room (I can think of several universities that have them) and chuck it in!
I think they did: there is a mention at the end of the article as how they lost a camera during a test and they are trying to piece together the footage they could salvage.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 69.7 ms ] threadTrying. It does not look fire proof to me, especially the power supply. Did they ever tried to submerge it in a pool for 72 hours. They forgot to say also if those specs are operating or nonoperating.
> The concept is more that one can pull the drives out, put them in another Synology NAS, and be up and running quickly after a fire.
The only thing I can think of is CCTV footage that might be too heavy to transfer over slow links in remote locations.
A much better option would be to buy a gun safe from Costco or the like with a large internal volume and ethernet/power passthrough ports. The air inside will act as an additional insulating layer buying you time.
Isn't the autoignition temperature of paper like a third of that?
Well, no. Actually it's a bit more variable than that, but "Between Fahrenheight 424 and Fahrenheight 475" doesn't make as punchy a book title for some reason.
https://ftloscience.com/flash-points-autoignition-fahrenheit...
Can you imagine being on the engineering team for this thing and NOT fire testing it? That's the fun part!
The Curie temp of hard drives seems to be quite low, depending on the exact platter formulation. A target temp of ~800C is far too high. In a hot fire, I wouldn't expect the data to last more than 10-15 mins,
72 hrs of water protection might be enough.
But this still makes less sense than keeping copies of data off-prem somewhere - preferably a very very long way away.
And preferably multiple copies.
There may be reasons (privacy, security...) why you might not want to do that. But still. An encrypted off-prem solution, even if it's multiple NAS boxes in various offices and not a cloud thing, is going to be far more robust than a drive safe.
Maybe it’s just me, but seems like a bit of a design oversight to mount everything at the bottom.
In the event of a flood surrounding a potentially sealed box, having the cables further up might just make all the difference, right?
But from a cursory read, it seems they are mostly interested in ensuring only the spinning disks are safe (the SSDs are outside the sealed box, with the board).