A few weeks ago I solicited NAS advice, trying to get someone to talk me out of buying a Synology. In the end, I ended up building my own ultra-fast Infiniband storage server for work projects and also buying a very low-cost Synology DS212j for home use. I stuffed it with two 4TB drives, and have been using it ever since. To help others, here are my quick impressions:
* It is small, perhaps even cute, and really really quiet. It took my wife until yesterday to notice that it existed, even though it runs just a few feet from her office chair. The only audible noise is the noise from the drives, which isn't much noise at all. The Synology fan is as close to silent as you can imagine.
* The web GUI is a rather obvious OS X rip-off, and is very easy to use. The documentation is acceptable, but not great.
* Synology is stuffed with nice features. So far I am using - and I mean actually using - SMB, AFP, NFS, Apple Time Machine, Cloud Synch, Time backup, DNS, DHCP, Surveilance Station, Logitech Media Server, CrashPlan, and WordPress. Additionally, I have briefly dabbled in iSCSI, Glacier Backup, Photo Station, VPN, and SugarCRM.
* Power consumption is minimal, around 16 watts.
* It's really slow. I copied about a million files requiring 1.5TB of space from the file server it replaces and it took half a day - about 100kb/s. While large files can, as advertised, transfer at around 70MB/second, a folder full of small files is more likely to run at a few kb per second. I'm not exaggerating.
* Surprisingly, it doesn't seem pinched for resources. Right now I'm simultaneously running one camera stream, one Windows backup, one large file copy, a Cloud Sync, and a web UI session. CPU is at 90% and RAM is at 65%.
In hindsight, I probably should have bought a four-drive model with more IOPS and just a bit more CPU power. I will most likely wait until there is a future 10GbE, four-drive model available for a reasonable price. Even better would be a model with those specifications plus an SSD drive for tiering and caching of data. These days, it's the network and old spinning hard drive technology that is holding back computing more than anything else.
* It is small, perhaps even cute, and really really quiet. It took my wife until yesterday to notice that it existed, even though it runs just a few feet from her office chair. The only audible noise is the noise from the drives, which isn't much noise at all. The Synology fan is as close to silent as you can imagine.
* The web GUI is a rather obvious OS X rip-off, and is very easy to use. The documentation is acceptable, but not great.
* Synology is stuffed with nice features. So far I am using - and I mean actually using - SMB, AFP, NFS, Apple Time Machine, Cloud Synch, Time backup, DNS, DHCP, Surveilance Station, Logitech Media Server, CrashPlan, and WordPress. Additionally, I have briefly dabbled in iSCSI, Glacier Backup, Photo Station, VPN, and SugarCRM.
* Power consumption is minimal, around 16 watts.
* It's really slow. I copied about a million files requiring 1.5TB of space from the file server it replaces and it took half a day - about 100kb/s. While large files can, as advertised, transfer at around 70MB/second, a folder full of small files is more likely to run at a few kb per second. I'm not exaggerating.
* Surprisingly, it doesn't seem pinched for resources. Right now I'm simultaneously running one camera stream, one Windows backup, one large file copy, a Cloud Sync, and a web UI session. CPU is at 90% and RAM is at 65%.
In hindsight, I probably should have bought a four-drive model with more IOPS and just a bit more CPU power. I will most likely wait until there is a future 10GbE, four-drive model available for a reasonable price. Even better would be a model with those specifications plus an SSD drive for tiering and caching of data. These days, it's the network and old spinning hard drive technology that is holding back computing more than anything else.
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