"Even though the DS1815+ is not as power efficient as the DS1812+..."
A 1% in power consumption difference is hardly the basis for saying one unit is more or less efficient than the other. In any case, that difference is presumably well within error bars for a test like this.
What Ganesh actually wrote is (paraphrased) "Even if the momentaneous power measurement is slightly higher, the faster rebuild time makes it more power efficient than the last model".
And in that regard the DS1815+ is better by a lot more than a measly percent.
I agree, but this is targetted at the lazy (or whatever) who don't know how to build a simple array. I have two 8-drive computers myself. One with a deticated card and one without using a ZSF array in RAID 6 and RAIDZ2 formats (each 2-drive redundancy). Both free software and easy to do. But it took me half an hour to setup the systems instead of plugging in 8 drives and 'going'. But my servers can do more then these could. Plus with my older platinum power supplies and systems in low-power mode, they also use extremely low power unless they need it. They can do a lot more too though and I use their capable processing power when I need it without using my other computers. But... I'm not their target either. No way I'd spend that much on a case. Even the server with the array card (very expensive part) didn't cost that much new.
It has nothing to do with laziness. For some people, the hours invested in setting it up, administrating it and troubleshooting it are worth more than what you save by going the DIY route. That "half hour" of setting it up is just laughable, unless you have set up already A LOT, but then you would have to count also the time you invested in those installations to learn what you need to do it so efficiently now.
Sorry but no. It took me no more then a half hour to do a basic linux install and setup the array. There were NO hours to set it up. Sorry, but that's all it takes... It is extremely strait forward anymore and I've had the computer illiterate setup a linux distro from scratch with no practice and just an install CD in less then an hour. You can google how to specifically setup ZFS arrays in your favorite distro in about 30 seconds and setting up the array takes just about that long also in today's age. It's not even the linux from a few years ago. Everything is faster and better today. So no, it just doesn't take long. Plus, as I said, the raw power capable of doing something other then just hosting files makes the box more useful. Plus I did it with extra computer parts that were sitting around otherwise wasted and going to good will. So in effect it cost me nothing at that point.
There are 'other' reasons I won't run a Syn array. In the end I'd rather trust proven OS with all the options they allow and security there-in instead of one single provider with specific locked software. I also like the security and recover-ability of ZFS over even my older hardware-raid card.
But ya, in the end, it comes down to being too ignorant (that's not a bad word, just a state of knowledge) or lazy of how to do it vs just spending the money to let someone else do it for you. But hey, that's how companies like DELL made all of their money too...
In my case, had all the hardware going to goodwill anyhow, cost $0. But even to buy something basic, $300 TOPS to set up a basic system to handle this. So to me even, $750 would be worth my time to take a bit to do it from scratch. I make a darn good living myself (enough to build a lot of personal computers and give $ away every holiday) but not $750/hour or even half that for two or three hours of time to do it.
The thing you're forgetting is that all the time you've invested researching the components and deciding which parts you want is also what goes into building the system. Even if you were to google and look up the parts used in Synology and try to mimic what they have, it takes time. Then there's the time for shipment for the individual parts, instead of just the system and the additional drives. It all factors in, which you are ignoring. Then there are people that value their spare time at higher than you. Then there are people that value the Synology software, or don't want to worry about security holes - you call it ignorance, others might call it insurance. They also don't have to deal with parts that may come DOA. All of that adds up in time spent, whether it's upfront or paid throughout.
I don't have a Synology, but I know those that do and there's more to it than just ease of build. Frankly, I would like to see them offer something other than an Atom proc.
Let's see.. You get any CPU with a matching motherboard and ram setup, a good power-supply (most critical part of any build save the motherboard)... (To match a Syn setup, it would be hard get that cheap in the open market so you're automatically going to get stronger getting components). Get a case and if the mother board doesn't have enough SATA ports for 8 drives, a SATA add-on expansion card. That's it. Shopping, 10 minutes, 30 if you're looking for just something just so. Delivery a few days, same as ordering drives or the Syn...
Then download a copy of Linux. For ZFS, Ubuntu is one I like alot cause it's very plug and play, lots of GUIs for desktop users and you can do it so fast it's quite amusing.
And ignorance, that's what the iCloud users had who just had all of their photos stolen... It's secured with Apple on their very secure server so it has to be secure right? So let's take stupid photos we never want someone else seeing, they're safe... That's ignorance also.
Do what ever ya'll like, but the kid the street saw my setup and built one for his dad out of an old spare computer they had. He just asked me what OS I used on them to setup the array and if he needed other special hardware. He had to buy a SATA expansion card. It took him an hour and a half to do the job to surprise his dad... And that included downloading the software. I believe he's 9 or 10 and I wouldn't consider him geeky or nerdy by any means (I'm a geek or a nerd by trade for example)... I think he's in 5th grade. All I told him was to look up Ubuntu and ZFS for the array for any number of drives. He only had 4 drives of the same size so I said RAIDZ (or RAID 5) was probably the best bang for the buck in that situation. His dad liked it and asked me if I did it for him, I explained it 'no' and he got a new setup of drives in much higher capacity and they built an 8 drive RAIDZ2 together. Cost them drives. But that's the point, it doesn't really take more know-how then googling the how-to and following prompts. Even installing Ubuntu or CentOS is VERY fast (WAY faster then windows). Setup a cron job to email you if the array has an issue, plenty of how-to on that also and it's a one-liner. Install any packages you want (Plex, etc.), setup shared folders on your new array if that's your goal, (Easiest way for windows users would be to setup SAMBA shares) etc. There, I gave you the 101 class on everything you need to know.
And I've said it many times, the Syn products aren't "bad" per-say, just WAY too expensive.
Spare time worth more then $750, even at $200/hour, I want to make the millions they do.. cause that's what it all comes down to. To bring home $200/hour, after taxes (to pay for the product) in the US, you have to make roughly a million a year with 40/hour weeks. Freakin kick-butt! OKok, so you're very slow and careful and want to do it just perfect and it's going to take you a whole 8 hour day... $93.75/hour... or a paycheck gross of roughly $400k/year (actually more, I was letting you take home 50% when it's more like 40%). Takes you 2 whole days? Still $46.86/hour... Still a few hundred grand a year....
This should be somewhere around $500-600 empty... But competition is so slim, they can charge whatever they want.
The thing is, no business is going to base a NAS on hardware that's "going to goodwill anyhow" unless they're run on a shoestring budget or one that doesn't comprehend data integrity. $750 is worth the time because it gives you the following with Synology:
-Easy setup -Easy replication to a second Synology -Easy migration from a failing NAS -Easy reporting/monitoring for small to medium business -Easy administration for a business that doesn't have your level of IT knowledge
This product isn't for you, but actually, the Synology DSM operating system *is* a proven OS; it's at version 5.1 now. The argument for purchasing one is the same as the argument for buying a server over building your own --in business, there's good reason for letting someone else do that part of the work for you, so you can concentrate on, you know, --business.
I don't know any business that would use these as secure NAS storage anyhow. Businesses have an entirely different type of storage, far faster, more secure, and actually quite larger. The last bank we bought is a simple rack configured for 24 drives in volumes of 12 that you can use any way you choose. These are for consumers, not businesses.
And for the record, I don't work with hardware, I write software by trade. Although my direct trade has nothing to do with helping me learn to set these up. That knowledge came from a few minutes on Google and I can follow instructions. I've also fixed a failed array, moved them to new hardware, etc. ZFS is actually one of the oldest and most secure RAID type format, originally created for Solaris/Sun systems very long ago. The nice thing about modern ZSF arrays is how easy they are to recover, unlike hardware-raid options which even putting the drives in an identical controller might not work.
And all of your bullets are easily covered by the combination accept the last which, honestly, if your level of IT is that low in any company, you should be out-sourcing all of your storage and IT needs and not even trying to do this alone. But it would be almost questionable why any company that small would need live, fast storage like this. New cloud services are generally far more their cup-of-tea for the very small businesses. Literally buy it and forget it, use it like a drive within your company, fully encrypted, etc. and surprisingly quick considering. Even my extremely large company has a few online storage systems for the 'very cheap' departments to use instead of spending a bit more for a rack in the data center and tape backups there-after. The cloud is far cheaper if you're not talking hundreds of Tera-bytes and extreme speed access. That's from the business side of the discussion. But again, these are aimed at consumers.
"Businesses have an entirely different type of storage, far faster, more secure, and actually quite larger." You mean this same hardware in a rack mount? Did you even read this article? Any business employing 1-50 or so people would be the target for this NAS. Something like a hairdresser, contractor, accounting firm (hopefully with offsite backup also). You are too entrenched in your view point to see that others have different priorities and objectives. Yes, for people like you and I, setting up an 8 bay NAS with generic components is trivial, but the manager at your grocery store doesn't know, and doesn't care. They will buy something that is plug-and-play, has a warranty, and has the storage they need. Imagine if that manager hired you to set up a storage solution, would you custom build the hardware and install Ubuntu for it? No, you would quote out one of these, and a couple hours of install. Making you a nice profit, and not having the buyer have deal with you and the cobbled together solution for any little problem in hardware compatibility, or down time, or interoperability issues.
The manager at the grocery store isn't responsible for buying hardware and would have no need for said hardware. Nore would a hairdresser... And even if they did need storage, online storage would be more cost beneficial in most of those cases. But what are they going to store? The grocery store has a giant IT system tied into the parent company with their proprietary software. The Hairdresser has contact information, assuming they have their own store and not working for a chain... My parents both work at a grocery while they retire. And unfortunately, mom & pop groceries are all but gone due to the push of the horrible corporate arm. And I help my wife's hairdresser who does my hair for Locks for Love when I grew it out (a free everything when I donated). The most she ever needs is her laptop cleaned of malware. All of her contact information is safely and securely stored in the 'cloud' (god I hate that word... it's on servers on the internet... but let's tag it with a stupid word now that speeds are high enough we can push to outside storage easier...) Nice try though. Ironic on both counts, but no dice.
SirGCal: yes, I am resurrecting this comment chain almost a year later. I rarely post on the 'net to comments like these: so lucky you. We just deployed this NAS for my client. My client is a small retail business (20+ employees) who sell medical scrubs and equipment. They own three retail stores, run two large e-commerce sites and handle a lot of phone orders. We setup the NAS to retain local disk images of all their machines. We also use it for VM hosting and additional file sharing needs. They use me as a part time contractor because they have a very tight budget and cannot afford a full time (competent) IT resource. They would much rather purchase a device, with manufacturer support, like this, than have me spend labor hours building something out that I may not be around to support later (i.e. if I get hit by a bus). We also backup everything to the cloud as a redundant fail-safe. This *includes* everything on the NAS. Sure, I could have set up my own solution. But, as a previous commenter mentioned: finding and purchasing the necessary hardware, setting it up, testing it and deploying it would have been more time consuming, and therefore more expensive. I am calling bull**** on going through that entire process in only 30 minutes. And, again, a custom solution would have been without manufacturer support. So, "no dice".
Configure a NAS unit like this beside someone who is trying to create a HA iscsi server with plex, picture sharing website, and cloud synch replacing onedrive/dropbox/etc with little prior knowledge. Then do watch them both when something goes wrong. Time is money.
If I rebuilt my home file server from scratch, it would probably take me less than an hour to get it up and running. When I did it originally, I spent days experimenting which filesystem to use, tuning cache and stripe size on the array for performance, diagnose samba configuration issues etc. As a hobby, that's fine. If I had to charge for my time, it would have been cheaper to just buy a preconfigured NAS.
A full time employee making ~$40k a year can cost a company about ~$55k a year, and even then, having vendor support and warranty can leave them free to do other support tasks.
Half hour to set up linux? Sure that is possible. But that is hardly typical for soup to nuts, setting up Suse/Debian/Ubuntu, configuring network, doing the inevitable updates, then configuring drives as arrays, iScsi targets etc. Unless you are on a 'nix machine everyday most of us will have to google or man how to do this or that in regards to building an array, setting up certain services we want available and so on. Linux is certainly powerful, but it is not terribly user friendly for the average consumer. As far as 'proven', Synology, Qnap and Drobo have all been doing this NAS thing for a while. They are pretty mature, and have certain features that have evolved in response to their user base. While these are not impossible or even hard to replicate on Linux, Windows or OS X, they are already there on most of these NAS. Even in business IT we sometimes lean on these consumer grade NAS for certain low impact applications. (we actually used a Drobo on a project a couple years ago, not my call actually) You open the box, plug it in, beep boop, it works. There is value to that, expecially if you dont have a shelf full of spares in the back and if you already spent all day working on technical stuff and just want it to work.
"Half hour to set up linux? Sure that is possible. But that is hardly typical for soup to nuts, setting up Suse/Debian/Ubuntu, configuring network, doing the inevitable updates, then configuring drives as arrays, iScsi targets etc."
It's soooo complicated... Insert boot CD/DVD. Follow prompts... In 5 minutes the system is running with the networks, graphics, sound, etc already fully configured (assuming you are using a desktop/server with desktop GUI version, even faster without). Run the update which is a one-liner and takes another 2 minutes. That's the whole point, it's not bogged down by Microsoft's horrible server communication and 'update' system. Then plug in the X drives and run a few simple commands easily found with google in less then 3 minutes (to do the full ZFS install, it takes 3 and that's including another 'update')... Setup your array pool, ok that might take 10 minutes... and cron a watchdog script to monitor the array and email you if there is an issue... Setup shares.. Ohh.. done. Good lord how slow do you people work? when I lost an OS drive on one of the array boxes and had to stick in a new one, I went from empty system to fully up and re-running again in 10 minutes. It just doesn't take long with Linux. It is long since 'Proven' itself and been tweaked for the fast installers. Want an even faster and more like Syn system, use FreeNAS. Hell, don't even need a boot up HDD/SDD. It can live and run from a USB drive and do all of the above also. Ideal for copying something like a Syn. Can do all that and more. It's a more specific version of FreeBSD. All just another flavor of Linux. It's just not the hard OS it used to be and even Syn runs a flavor of Linux Kernel as the Synology DSM tweaked by it's developers. It's all the same. But as many Syn users learned last year, being 'unique' also makes it a target for viruses. That's why Windows gets so many and other OSs don't get as much. But when the users wanted to 'lock' the Syn boxes and hold them up for hostage, it wasn't that difficult to write a virus to target that. That's one very large problem with proprietary OSs.
Laziness is not the factor. It's warrantied performance and reliability vs the hourly costs of screwing it around to figure it out yourself. For a home/tech user you might see this as a side project; for someone at a small engineering company that can't afford an IT department the boss would see me building an array myself as something holding business-critical data that could blow up on its own without a phone number to call for help AND me spending like 4-8 hours of time I could otherwise be doing engineering billable at $180/hr. Tada, it just paid for itself.
So then you're a multi-millionare making $180 an hour.. Trade ya... I make plenty to give $ away every holiday just cause I can, but I don't have anything like that...
As a business, if the file server goes down, then it's down time multiplied by how many employees you have. Could be way, way more than $180 an hour that the owner is losing.
Then they shouldn't have mission-critical information on something so vulnerable. Not even on something like my own boxes. That's the companies own fault for not having proper data protection for mission critical information.
No, it's your fault for not *telling* them that's what they need, and not refusing to work with them till they agreed to let you build that sort of redundancy into the system. Not sp
That's why I'm glad I'm out of working with SMBs and SOHOs - I don't have to fix half-baked solutions like yours any more.
I assume you are using 5gb of RAM per TB for dedupe, unless of course you *want* the server to page itself to a halt in a years time when you run out of memory?
I've spent a decade designing and installing system, storage and network solutions for SOHOs and SMBs up to government level - people like you are a nightmare.
And yes, SMBs and SOHOs have been loving this kit for the last couple of years since the price/performance/featureset trifecta came through - because it means they don't have to deal with people like you, either.
Oh and you do realise that DSM is built around the Linux kernel, right? And that far from being proprietary, it's Linux and MDADM? To such a degree that if you need to recovery disks fast, you can just fire up MDADM, recreate the VG and copy the data off from a live Ubuntu CD?
As for Synolocker, if you leave port 389 open to the internet on a Windows box you'll be FUBAR PDQ too - but as a good sysadmin, you'd only let remote users access the box via obfuscated ports at worst, or a VPN connection so you'd not have been touched by it...nothing to do with proprietary (See ShellShock for details - thats proper FLOSS and still got humped) and everything to do with being poorly advised on setup and config.
By people like you. Who think that BSD is a flavour of Linux. Hint - it's not. Linux was developed specifically because it's *not* Unix. Do the damned research....
Are you kidding? That's a normal engineering rate. I don't get paid that, the COMPANY bills that. That is what keeps the lights on. I can't bill the customer $180/hr when I'm setting up a RAID array, but I can when I'm actually WORKING ON THEIR PROJECT.
I built a 30TB FreeNAS box and while I enjoyed it - this has little to do with the "the lazy" - I'd estimate it was at least 50 hours research in getting it humming properly and I'm relatively tech savvy.
I was looking into an NAS for media storage on my home network and concluded that I was much better off hooking up a bunch of 4TB USB drives to a low-power PC, because the PC can also do things an NAS can't, like running Plex Server well. With USB 3.0 it's just as fast as internal storage.
Just FYI you can run plex on any x86 based Synology. I have it on my DS1512+ and it works just fine.
This isn't supposed to be the cheapest option. As other comments have pointed out, this is for the person that just wants it to work with minimal care and feeding. I've set up plenty of freeNAS solutions that would be cheaper to build than what I have with my Synology. However, the ability to do basically nothing but updates for the past 2.5 years and have it all work is worth it. Plus its all self contained, uses little energy and is quiet.
Ya, I'm all for doing it yourself anyhow but these Syn boxes can Plex without an issue. They cannot however do some of the other things I use them for but that's another topic a bit outside the scope of all this. Still your own rig can potentially do more and be more useful and obviously cheaper so if it works for you, that's the whole point. Sweet.
I always wonder if these "not worth the money, I can build one for 1/x the price" are troll posts, or if people are seriously comparing items the consumer can expect to just buy, plug in and use, versus something they have to research, build and maintain. When I buy synology units I don't pay $1000+ for the hardware, I pay for people to research and develop a solution that works out of the box in a form factor that I find appealing, that takes 10 seconds of my time to maintain. If I didn't work, didn't have kids, and had nothing better to do, I would keep building custom FreeNAS units. As things stand, I buy synology units instead.
As for the "I can set up a custom solution in 30 minutes", No. Factor in the time you spend researching the hardware, OS, software, just to mention a few. And the first time you run into a problem in FreeNAS, prepare to put aside a few hours. Admittedly, I had a lot of fun when I put together my FreeNAS unit, however now my time is much too precious to waste on something as minor as NAS units. When I had free time to spare, I was not Synology's target market. Now I am.
I always wonder if these "not worth the money, I can build one for 1/x the price" are troll posts, or if people are seriously comparing items the consumer can expect to just buy, plug in and use, versus something they have to research, build and maintain. When I buy synology units I don't pay $1000+ for the hardware, I pay for people to research and develop a solution that works out of the box in a form factor that I find appealing, that takes 10 seconds of my time to maintain. If I didn't work, didn't have kids, and had nothing better to do, I would keep building custom FreeNAS units. As things stand, I buy synology units instead.
As for the "I can set up a custom solution in 30 minutes", No. Factor in the time you spend researching the hardware, OS, software, just to mention a few. And the first time you run into a problem in FreeNAS, prepare to put aside a few hours. Admittedly, I had a lot of fun when I put together my FreeNAS unit, however now my time is much too precious to waste on something as minor as NAS units. When I had free time to spare, I was not Synology's target market. Now I am.
And to answer those "oh, your time is worth $800 for the time it takes to put together a NAS", Yes. That's the amount of money I would need to be paid to do something I do not have an interest in doing. Add the fact I wouldn't be spending time with my kids, and $800 is a very good deal.
Apologies for the double post. Wouldn't stop loading when I tried to post on my iPad so I tried to post using my PC. Of course it posted on both devices... Mods please combine, or delete the first post if possible.
It is better to have a tool dedicated for purpose. Computer is like: what fits everything fits nothing. You get support , upgrades and cool functionality from Synology. Plus if you talk directly to SPAN dot COM you can get better deal than elsewhere!
For the encryption performance graph, putting the non-encrypted performance numbers would be helpful. Not a huge deal with this one since there was minimal impact; but being able to see how large the penalty is without having to switch back and forth would be helpful on reviews of less capable models.
And like I've commented previously; with current generation NASes growing from just boxes of disk drives into light weight general purpose servers as well, your tests really need to be expanded to capture at least some of that capability. I'd suggest running a web server and measuring how much light traffic on that impacts the rest of the devices performance and virtualization hosting abilities for models that offer it (still just QNAP?) at a minimum.
USB3 has CPU overhead far greater than any built-in storage overhead, isn't RAID aware, suffers from serious latency issues in comparison to SATA, and eats up a port that could be used for peripheral use. USB3 should be used for removable access primarily, and nearline storage secondarily.
Not saying you are doing it wrong, but USB3 doesn't scale after the second disk is added. That's a serious problem.
Is there any specs on how these perform when compare to a simple, business-class server that has 8-bays? Something like a Dell PowerEdge T320 that has the capability for 8 x 3.5" drives and includes a quad-port GB NIC can be had for basically the same price as the Synology here.
These larger-cost 8-bay NAS machines have a high price tag, so a natural competitor (in terms of price) seems to be servers from the standard server vendors. So I would love to see how it actually compares.
Poorly. Their only advantages over a computer are smaller and more power efficient. People will talk about how it saves so much time but you have to save quite a lot of time to make up the difference in cost between a synology and a much cheaper and faster computer.
My time, plus any employees or services I have on the NAS could cost me the initial price each *hour* if it goes down. So having one physical unit, with hot swap, and on the fly rebuild is worth the price in some cases.
I see a lot of comments like this, and I can only imagine you're assuming that: 1) The NAS is only being used as a file server with the most basic setup. 2) Updates are not an issue.
I agree that building a custom NAS box is a fun project and can save a lot of money. However, not everyone wants to deal with the complications that can arise from setting up multiple services and keeping them up-to-date.
Say you want an email server. To install and fully configure Synology's Mail Station takes no more than 10 minutes. If you want webmail to go with it, just install a second package. There's almost zero setup required. Sure, you'll have more options on a generic Linux installation, but setting up a fully functional and securely configured email system takes quite a lot of research if you're just doing it one time.
Of course, all of that time spent properly configuring your custom-built server is worthless if you don't keep it up to date. As of DSM 5.1, Synology will automatically install either all updates or just security updates, and you know that the updated components have been tested and work together. I have never had a problem with a service going down due to a Synology update. With full Linux distributions, not so much. Most of the time updates work fine, but I would never trust something as critical as my primary email server to automatic updates.
Hi, while I agree on the simplicity argument (installing postfix, dovecon and roundcube surely require some time), RedHat and CentOS distros are very good from an update standpoint. I had very little problems with many server (100+) administered over the past years, even with automatic update enabled. Moreover, with the right yum plugin you can install security updates only, if you want.
Nowadays, and with a strong backup strategy, I feel confident enough to enable yum auto-update on all server except the ones used as hypervisors (I had a single hypervisor with auto-update enabled for testing purpose, and anyway it run without a problem).
Sadly, with Debian and Ubuntu LTS distros I had some more problems regarding updates, but perhaps it is only a unfortunately coincidence...
Hi agree with people saying that similar units are primarily targeted at users that want a clean and simple "off-the-shell" experience. With units as the one reviewed, you basically need to insert the disks, power on the device and follow one or two wizards.
That said, a custom-build NAS has vastly better performance/price ratio. One of our customer bought a PowerEdge R515 (6 core Piledriver @ 3.1+ GHz) with 16 GB of ECC RAM, a PERC H700 RAID card with 512 MB of NVRAM cache memory and a 3 years on-site warranty. Total price: about 1600 euros (+ VAT).
He then installed 8x 2TB WD RE and I configured it with a 11+ TB RAID6 volumes with thin LVM volumes and XFS filesystem. It serves both as a backup server (deduplicated via hard links and rsync) and as a big storage for non-critical things (eg: personal files).
Our customer is VERY satisfied of how it works, but hey - face the reality: a skilled people did all the setup work for him, and (obviously) he paid us...
This is about the most sensible comment on this entire review.
If his budget halved and he couldn't necessarily afford support from you on a regular basis (or at least wanted his hourly callout charge to be lowered) I'm guessing you'd be more tempted to push him in the direction of a device like this, though?
(I've been there, done that, and swapped out more than a few Windows SBS/standard+exchange boxes for Syno units over the last few years for this very reason, natch - the Windows license costs themselves pretty much pay for one of these)
I have an 1813+ sitting next to my heavily modded (aka needed to use a dremel) case with 15 hot swap disks (currently Linux + btrfs + samba & NFS). I have and use (and love) both. There are use cases for both, but I would certainly not hand my custom solution over to someone random and expect it to just work. I have automated updates and reboots (all hail "if [ -f /var/run/reboot-required ]") but occasionally something does not work right. No normal person is going to be able to figure that out in a reasonable amount of time.
Also 30 minutes to install and configure it yourself is total BS. I have saltstack and automated PXE installs at home and 30 minutes is still stretching it for me for a full stack install and configure. Linux + Samba + backup + updates + RAID and/or mdadm and/or zfs and/or btrfs installed and *configured* in 30 minutes is beyond optimistic, even for technical people. $800 does not cover 8 hours of my time, so ya, I recommend Synology for certain (mostly home/SOHO) scenarios.
I can expect my 70 year old dad to be able to keep his synology up to date, but not a Linux or BSD distro. That is just a ridiculous thing to expect.
Ganesh, thanks for the thoughtful review. I am very interested in seeing how SSD caching affects performance. Take 2 drives out, replace them with 240gb SSDs and retest. Synology is putting a lot of emphasis on ssd caching, and I will be making my buying decision largely based on that aspect alone.
It depends on your use case. For large sequential transfers SSDs are not going to help you very much since a couple of spinning metal drives can easily saturate a gigabit link. If you need a lot more IOPS then an SSD cache will help you out here but only so much, since again the limit is gigabit ethernet (16000 IOPS or so).
*note* this applies to gigabit links, 10+ gigabit ethernet or infiniband connected devices can see an improvement with SSDs.
Yes, please , test Read and Write Cache effect. In my 1813+ (4GB) on DSM 5.0 I installed a 2 disk Read/Write SSD Cache. Strangely streaming performance dropped, and since my use case is highly dependent on streaming, I removed the cache. I wonder now if things are better with 5.1 or with the read only cache.
First, your bottleneck is the gigabit LAN. A couple of spinning rust drives can easily saturate a gigabit link so an SSD cache is not going to accelerate a streaming (aka sequential read) operation over gigabit ethernet. If you need more IOPS then an SSD cache will help (gigabit ethernet tops out somewhere around 16000 IOPS), though at the cost of reduced throughput.
IOPS and throughput are at opposite ends of the spectrum, an increase in one means a decrease in the other. If your use case is sequential reads and writes, don't bother with the SSDs. On DAS (direct attached storage) you can improve both IOPS and throughput with an SSD cache since it takes a whole lot of platters to equal the performance of a single 850 pro SSD.
Also note that this problem has nothing to do with Synology, you have the same constraints even if you had 24+ thread CPU(s) and 128 GB+ RAM with <insert favourite redundancy technology here>. Gigabit ethernet is slow, period.
I actually own the DS1812+. I was going to build my own NAS but I wanted a hardware solution for the RAID, because software RAID is just too slow. Then I could not find the right type of tower I wanted for the drives, that was another issue, then I was not able to expand the RAID on the fly if I wanted to add more drives or even build a dynamic partition, so I decided to go with that solution instead. I haven't got one single problem with my unit that just reached 1 year now. There are far better solution in NAS but their price is extremely expensive, starting at 50K like the Equal Logics. This solution is for SMB or people like me that don't want to spend time on assembling parts for a NAS. Also for a good NAS with good parts might cost more money: just the RAID card in hardware (PERC 6 or 7) is $300 and some NAS run with Xeons procs.
I have read the reviews about the Synology NAS devices with Avoton CPUs (DS1815+ and DS415+). Having bought one now myself, I wonder how far they have been tested.
I got the impression from former Anandtech articles about the new Avoton CPUs, that NAS devices equipped with those should be able to encrypt data with virtually no performance impact. The reviews proved that point, so I bought one.
However, Synology offers only eCryptFS, which does not work via NFS and exhibits the file names and directory structures in the clear - also, the maximum filename lengths are truncated to 143 characters. Thus, using it for general backup purposes is somewhat pointless.
On a side note, it is a shame that the Synology kernel configuration does not even include the dm-crypt.ko and cryptoloop.ko modules and that there are no userspace cryptsetup or losetup executables. This limits the usefulness of the Synology Avoton line of products to almost zilch.
Also, the GPL sources under http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl are out of date. There is no 5.1 version, which would contain the neccessary tools for the new Avoton machines like the DS1815+ and the DS415+. Thus, there is no self-cure for the situation, either.
This is the kind of improvement hints I have grown accustomed to in Anandtech reviews, but no word of it in the final words of these ones.
"Bay Trail is proving very effective in tablets" Seriously? Proof ... Being used for such well known brands as Teclast and Onda and Voyo is not "proving very effective".
Intel's goal for 2014 was 40 million tablets. I'm guessing, since we haven't heard much since that goal was set (but we have heard about the 2014 billion dollar losses in their mobile division, complementing the 2013 billion dollar losses) that they didn't QUITE make that...
The Foxconn (oops, sorry, "Nokia") iPad mini clone MAY change that --- but that won't ship for another three months, and I expect Apple have a plan in the wings the moment they feel any pressure at the low-end to drop the A5 iPad mini, move the iPad mini 2 down to that price slot, and, if necessary, slide in an A8 based iPaid mini 4 at the high end...
Meanwhile Lenovo was so impressed with Bay Trail that they dropped it from the Yoga for the (much more expensive) Broadwell-Y, not that that has done them any good...
I recently search for a NAS and find this category is actually the most overpriced stuffs in the consumer market nowadays. There are not much hard technology needed to build one and the actual cost is not expensive. And I don't see much power saving compare to a dedicated computer with RAID, and this is not quiet at all. The only possible reason that this high price tag existed is there are not many players (yet) on the market.I would suggested waiting one more year and see what happens. Compared to this, even Macs or iPhone are not overpriced at all...
Synology DS1815+ only SATA / 1.5 Gbps speed will be news
in the spec DS1815+ have sata2 * 8 but slot 7 and slot 8 can't over the 1.5 Gbps (SATA1) even SSD still can't over the 1.5 Gbps (150MB/s) they not tell this problem before consumer buy it,is illegal in your country?
if the consumer know slot 7 and slot 8 can't over the 1.5 Gbps,they maybe not buy this product this is our test video https://youtu.be/YDyEZKT_nAQ
you can confirm by yourself ,if you have DS1815+
and DS1813+ same problem ,is so many years
this will be big news,make Synology say sorry and compensate
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rpg1966 - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
"Even though the DS1815+ is not as power efficient as the DS1812+..."A 1% in power consumption difference is hardly the basis for saying one unit is more or less efficient than the other. In any case, that difference is presumably well within error bars for a test like this.
Sivar - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Agreed. 1%, if not within the margin of error, is at least well inside the margin of "who cares?"bestham - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
What Ganesh actually wrote is (paraphrased) "Even if the momentaneous power measurement is slightly higher, the faster rebuild time makes it more power efficient than the last model".And in that regard the DS1815+ is better by a lot more than a measly percent.
flyingpants1 - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
For $1050 this is impossible to justify for consumer use.. I'd rather get a $300 computer and have $750 left over for storage..jmke - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
you are not the target audience :)SirGCal - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
I agree, but this is targetted at the lazy (or whatever) who don't know how to build a simple array. I have two 8-drive computers myself. One with a deticated card and one without using a ZSF array in RAID 6 and RAIDZ2 formats (each 2-drive redundancy). Both free software and easy to do. But it took me half an hour to setup the systems instead of plugging in 8 drives and 'going'. But my servers can do more then these could. Plus with my older platinum power supplies and systems in low-power mode, they also use extremely low power unless they need it. They can do a lot more too though and I use their capable processing power when I need it without using my other computers. But... I'm not their target either. No way I'd spend that much on a case. Even the server with the array card (very expensive part) didn't cost that much new.asendra - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
It has nothing to do with laziness. For some people, the hours invested in setting it up, administrating it and troubleshooting it are worth more than what you save by going the DIY route.That "half hour" of setting it up is just laughable, unless you have set up already A LOT, but then you would have to count also the time you invested in those installations to learn what you need to do it so efficiently now.
SirGCal - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Sorry but no. It took me no more then a half hour to do a basic linux install and setup the array. There were NO hours to set it up. Sorry, but that's all it takes... It is extremely strait forward anymore and I've had the computer illiterate setup a linux distro from scratch with no practice and just an install CD in less then an hour. You can google how to specifically setup ZFS arrays in your favorite distro in about 30 seconds and setting up the array takes just about that long also in today's age. It's not even the linux from a few years ago. Everything is faster and better today. So no, it just doesn't take long. Plus, as I said, the raw power capable of doing something other then just hosting files makes the box more useful. Plus I did it with extra computer parts that were sitting around otherwise wasted and going to good will. So in effect it cost me nothing at that point.There are 'other' reasons I won't run a Syn array. In the end I'd rather trust proven OS with all the options they allow and security there-in instead of one single provider with specific locked software. I also like the security and recover-ability of ZFS over even my older hardware-raid card.
But ya, in the end, it comes down to being too ignorant (that's not a bad word, just a state of knowledge) or lazy of how to do it vs just spending the money to let someone else do it for you. But hey, that's how companies like DELL made all of their money too...
In my case, had all the hardware going to goodwill anyhow, cost $0. But even to buy something basic, $300 TOPS to set up a basic system to handle this. So to me even, $750 would be worth my time to take a bit to do it from scratch. I make a darn good living myself (enough to build a lot of personal computers and give $ away every holiday) but not $750/hour or even half that for two or three hours of time to do it.
vol7ron - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
The thing you're forgetting is that all the time you've invested researching the components and deciding which parts you want is also what goes into building the system. Even if you were to google and look up the parts used in Synology and try to mimic what they have, it takes time. Then there's the time for shipment for the individual parts, instead of just the system and the additional drives. It all factors in, which you are ignoring. Then there are people that value their spare time at higher than you. Then there are people that value the Synology software, or don't want to worry about security holes - you call it ignorance, others might call it insurance. They also don't have to deal with parts that may come DOA. All of that adds up in time spent, whether it's upfront or paid throughout.I don't have a Synology, but I know those that do and there's more to it than just ease of build. Frankly, I would like to see them offer something other than an Atom proc.
SirGCal - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Let's see.. You get any CPU with a matching motherboard and ram setup, a good power-supply (most critical part of any build save the motherboard)... (To match a Syn setup, it would be hard get that cheap in the open market so you're automatically going to get stronger getting components). Get a case and if the mother board doesn't have enough SATA ports for 8 drives, a SATA add-on expansion card. That's it. Shopping, 10 minutes, 30 if you're looking for just something just so. Delivery a few days, same as ordering drives or the Syn...Then download a copy of Linux. For ZFS, Ubuntu is one I like alot cause it's very plug and play, lots of GUIs for desktop users and you can do it so fast it's quite amusing.
And ignorance, that's what the iCloud users had who just had all of their photos stolen... It's secured with Apple on their very secure server so it has to be secure right? So let's take stupid photos we never want someone else seeing, they're safe... That's ignorance also.
Do what ever ya'll like, but the kid the street saw my setup and built one for his dad out of an old spare computer they had. He just asked me what OS I used on them to setup the array and if he needed other special hardware. He had to buy a SATA expansion card. It took him an hour and a half to do the job to surprise his dad... And that included downloading the software. I believe he's 9 or 10 and I wouldn't consider him geeky or nerdy by any means (I'm a geek or a nerd by trade for example)... I think he's in 5th grade. All I told him was to look up Ubuntu and ZFS for the array for any number of drives. He only had 4 drives of the same size so I said RAIDZ (or RAID 5) was probably the best bang for the buck in that situation. His dad liked it and asked me if I did it for him, I explained it 'no' and he got a new setup of drives in much higher capacity and they built an 8 drive RAIDZ2 together. Cost them drives. But that's the point, it doesn't really take more know-how then googling the how-to and following prompts. Even installing Ubuntu or CentOS is VERY fast (WAY faster then windows). Setup a cron job to email you if the array has an issue, plenty of how-to on that also and it's a one-liner. Install any packages you want (Plex, etc.), setup shared folders on your new array if that's your goal, (Easiest way for windows users would be to setup SAMBA shares) etc. There, I gave you the 101 class on everything you need to know.
And I've said it many times, the Syn products aren't "bad" per-say, just WAY too expensive.
Spare time worth more then $750, even at $200/hour, I want to make the millions they do.. cause that's what it all comes down to. To bring home $200/hour, after taxes (to pay for the product) in the US, you have to make roughly a million a year with 40/hour weeks. Freakin kick-butt! OKok, so you're very slow and careful and want to do it just perfect and it's going to take you a whole 8 hour day... $93.75/hour... or a paycheck gross of roughly $400k/year (actually more, I was letting you take home 50% when it's more like 40%). Takes you 2 whole days? Still $46.86/hour... Still a few hundred grand a year....
This should be somewhere around $500-600 empty... But competition is so slim, they can charge whatever they want.
LoneWolf15 - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
The thing is, no business is going to base a NAS on hardware that's "going to goodwill anyhow" unless they're run on a shoestring budget or one that doesn't comprehend data integrity. $750 is worth the time because it gives you the following with Synology:-Easy setup
-Easy replication to a second Synology
-Easy migration from a failing NAS
-Easy reporting/monitoring for small to medium business
-Easy administration for a business that doesn't have your level of IT knowledge
This product isn't for you, but actually, the Synology DSM operating system *is* a proven OS; it's at version 5.1 now. The argument for purchasing one is the same as the argument for buying a server over building your own --in business, there's good reason for letting someone else do that part of the work for you, so you can concentrate on, you know, --business.
carage - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
It will work great until it get hits with SynoLocker again.SirGCal - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I don't know any business that would use these as secure NAS storage anyhow. Businesses have an entirely different type of storage, far faster, more secure, and actually quite larger. The last bank we bought is a simple rack configured for 24 drives in volumes of 12 that you can use any way you choose. These are for consumers, not businesses.SirGCal - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
And for the record, I don't work with hardware, I write software by trade. Although my direct trade has nothing to do with helping me learn to set these up. That knowledge came from a few minutes on Google and I can follow instructions. I've also fixed a failed array, moved them to new hardware, etc. ZFS is actually one of the oldest and most secure RAID type format, originally created for Solaris/Sun systems very long ago. The nice thing about modern ZSF arrays is how easy they are to recover, unlike hardware-raid options which even putting the drives in an identical controller might not work.And all of your bullets are easily covered by the combination accept the last which, honestly, if your level of IT is that low in any company, you should be out-sourcing all of your storage and IT needs and not even trying to do this alone. But it would be almost questionable why any company that small would need live, fast storage like this. New cloud services are generally far more their cup-of-tea for the very small businesses. Literally buy it and forget it, use it like a drive within your company, fully encrypted, etc. and surprisingly quick considering. Even my extremely large company has a few online storage systems for the 'very cheap' departments to use instead of spending a bit more for a rack in the data center and tape backups there-after. The cloud is far cheaper if you're not talking hundreds of Tera-bytes and extreme speed access. That's from the business side of the discussion. But again, these are aimed at consumers.
DiHydro - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
"Businesses have an entirely different type of storage, far faster, more secure, and actually quite larger." You mean this same hardware in a rack mount? Did you even read this article? Any business employing 1-50 or so people would be the target for this NAS. Something like a hairdresser, contractor, accounting firm (hopefully with offsite backup also). You are too entrenched in your view point to see that others have different priorities and objectives. Yes, for people like you and I, setting up an 8 bay NAS with generic components is trivial, but the manager at your grocery store doesn't know, and doesn't care. They will buy something that is plug-and-play, has a warranty, and has the storage they need. Imagine if that manager hired you to set up a storage solution, would you custom build the hardware and install Ubuntu for it? No, you would quote out one of these, and a couple hours of install. Making you a nice profit, and not having the buyer have deal with you and the cobbled together solution for any little problem in hardware compatibility, or down time, or interoperability issues.SirGCal - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
The manager at the grocery store isn't responsible for buying hardware and would have no need for said hardware. Nore would a hairdresser... And even if they did need storage, online storage would be more cost beneficial in most of those cases. But what are they going to store? The grocery store has a giant IT system tied into the parent company with their proprietary software. The Hairdresser has contact information, assuming they have their own store and not working for a chain... My parents both work at a grocery while they retire. And unfortunately, mom & pop groceries are all but gone due to the push of the horrible corporate arm. And I help my wife's hairdresser who does my hair for Locks for Love when I grew it out (a free everything when I donated). The most she ever needs is her laptop cleaned of malware. All of her contact information is safely and securely stored in the 'cloud' (god I hate that word... it's on servers on the internet... but let's tag it with a stupid word now that speeds are high enough we can push to outside storage easier...) Nice try though. Ironic on both counts, but no dice.verraneventide - Tuesday, October 27, 2015 - link
SirGCal: yes, I am resurrecting this comment chain almost a year later. I rarely post on the 'net to comments like these: so lucky you. We just deployed this NAS for my client. My client is a small retail business (20+ employees) who sell medical scrubs and equipment. They own three retail stores, run two large e-commerce sites and handle a lot of phone orders. We setup the NAS to retain local disk images of all their machines. We also use it for VM hosting and additional file sharing needs. They use me as a part time contractor because they have a very tight budget and cannot afford a full time (competent) IT resource. They would much rather purchase a device, with manufacturer support, like this, than have me spend labor hours building something out that I may not be around to support later (i.e. if I get hit by a bus). We also backup everything to the cloud as a redundant fail-safe. This *includes* everything on the NAS. Sure, I could have set up my own solution. But, as a previous commenter mentioned: finding and purchasing the necessary hardware, setting it up, testing it and deploying it would have been more time consuming, and therefore more expensive. I am calling bull**** on going through that entire process in only 30 minutes. And, again, a custom solution would have been without manufacturer support. So, "no dice".awktane - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Configure a NAS unit like this beside someone who is trying to create a HA iscsi server with plex, picture sharing website, and cloud synch replacing onedrive/dropbox/etc with little prior knowledge. Then do watch them both when something goes wrong. Time is money.Gigaplex - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
If I rebuilt my home file server from scratch, it would probably take me less than an hour to get it up and running. When I did it originally, I spent days experimenting which filesystem to use, tuning cache and stripe size on the array for performance, diagnose samba configuration issues etc. As a hobby, that's fine. If I had to charge for my time, it would have been cheaper to just buy a preconfigured NAS.dgingeri - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
If their time is worth that much, they should hire a real IT guy to do it right.DiHydro - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
A full time employee making ~$40k a year can cost a company about ~$55k a year, and even then, having vendor support and warranty can leave them free to do other support tasks.CalaverasGrande - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Half hour to set up linux? Sure that is possible. But that is hardly typical for soup to nuts, setting up Suse/Debian/Ubuntu, configuring network, doing the inevitable updates, then configuring drives as arrays, iScsi targets etc.Unless you are on a 'nix machine everyday most of us will have to google or man how to do this or that in regards to building an array, setting up certain services we want available and so on.
Linux is certainly powerful, but it is not terribly user friendly for the average consumer.
As far as 'proven', Synology, Qnap and Drobo have all been doing this NAS thing for a while. They are pretty mature, and have certain features that have evolved in response to their user base. While these are not impossible or even hard to replicate on Linux, Windows or OS X, they are already there on most of these NAS. Even in business IT we sometimes lean on these consumer grade NAS for certain low impact applications. (we actually used a Drobo on a project a couple years ago, not my call actually)
You open the box, plug it in, beep boop, it works. There is value to that, expecially if you dont have a shelf full of spares in the back and if you already spent all day working on technical stuff and just want it to work.
SirGCal - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
"Half hour to set up linux? Sure that is possible. But that is hardly typical for soup to nuts, setting up Suse/Debian/Ubuntu, configuring network, doing the inevitable updates, then configuring drives as arrays, iScsi targets etc."It's soooo complicated... Insert boot CD/DVD. Follow prompts... In 5 minutes the system is running with the networks, graphics, sound, etc already fully configured (assuming you are using a desktop/server with desktop GUI version, even faster without). Run the update which is a one-liner and takes another 2 minutes. That's the whole point, it's not bogged down by Microsoft's horrible server communication and 'update' system. Then plug in the X drives and run a few simple commands easily found with google in less then 3 minutes (to do the full ZFS install, it takes 3 and that's including another 'update')... Setup your array pool, ok that might take 10 minutes... and cron a watchdog script to monitor the array and email you if there is an issue... Setup shares.. Ohh.. done. Good lord how slow do you people work? when I lost an OS drive on one of the array boxes and had to stick in a new one, I went from empty system to fully up and re-running again in 10 minutes. It just doesn't take long with Linux. It is long since 'Proven' itself and been tweaked for the fast installers. Want an even faster and more like Syn system, use FreeNAS. Hell, don't even need a boot up HDD/SDD. It can live and run from a USB drive and do all of the above also. Ideal for copying something like a Syn. Can do all that and more. It's a more specific version of FreeBSD. All just another flavor of Linux. It's just not the hard OS it used to be and even Syn runs a flavor of Linux Kernel as the Synology DSM tweaked by it's developers. It's all the same. But as many Syn users learned last year, being 'unique' also makes it a target for viruses. That's why Windows gets so many and other OSs don't get as much. But when the users wanted to 'lock' the Syn boxes and hold them up for hostage, it wasn't that difficult to write a virus to target that. That's one very large problem with proprietary OSs.
evilspoons - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Laziness is not the factor. It's warrantied performance and reliability vs the hourly costs of screwing it around to figure it out yourself. For a home/tech user you might see this as a side project; for someone at a small engineering company that can't afford an IT department the boss would see me building an array myself as something holding business-critical data that could blow up on its own without a phone number to call for help AND me spending like 4-8 hours of time I could otherwise be doing engineering billable at $180/hr. Tada, it just paid for itself.SirGCal - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
So then you're a multi-millionare making $180 an hour.. Trade ya... I make plenty to give $ away every holiday just cause I can, but I don't have anything like that...DiHydro - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
As a business, if the file server goes down, then it's down time multiplied by how many employees you have. Could be way, way more than $180 an hour that the owner is losing.SirGCal - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Then they shouldn't have mission-critical information on something so vulnerable. Not even on something like my own boxes. That's the companies own fault for not having proper data protection for mission critical information.Beany2013 - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
No, it's your fault for not *telling* them that's what they need, and not refusing to work with them till they agreed to let you build that sort of redundancy into the system. Not spThat's why I'm glad I'm out of working with SMBs and SOHOs - I don't have to fix half-baked solutions like yours any more.
I assume you are using 5gb of RAM per TB for dedupe, unless of course you *want* the server to page itself to a halt in a years time when you run out of memory?
I've spent a decade designing and installing system, storage and network solutions for SOHOs and SMBs up to government level - people like you are a nightmare.
And yes, SMBs and SOHOs have been loving this kit for the last couple of years since the price/performance/featureset trifecta came through - because it means they don't have to deal with people like you, either.
Oh and you do realise that DSM is built around the Linux kernel, right? And that far from being proprietary, it's Linux and MDADM? To such a degree that if you need to recovery disks fast, you can just fire up MDADM, recreate the VG and copy the data off from a live Ubuntu CD?
https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/faq/5...
As for Synolocker, if you leave port 389 open to the internet on a Windows box you'll be FUBAR PDQ too - but as a good sysadmin, you'd only let remote users access the box via obfuscated ports at worst, or a VPN connection so you'd not have been touched by it...nothing to do with proprietary (See ShellShock for details - thats proper FLOSS and still got humped) and everything to do with being poorly advised on setup and config.
By people like you. Who think that BSD is a flavour of Linux. Hint - it's not. Linux was developed specifically because it's *not* Unix. Do the damned research....
evilspoons - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
Are you kidding? That's a normal engineering rate. I don't get paid that, the COMPANY bills that. That is what keeps the lights on. I can't bill the customer $180/hr when I'm setting up a RAID array, but I can when I'm actually WORKING ON THEIR PROJECT.AbRASiON - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
I built a 30TB FreeNAS box and while I enjoyed it - this has little to do with the "the lazy" - I'd estimate it was at least 50 hours research in getting it humming properly and I'm relatively tech savvy.JeffFlanagan - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
I was looking into an NAS for media storage on my home network and concluded that I was much better off hooking up a bunch of 4TB USB drives to a low-power PC, because the PC can also do things an NAS can't, like running Plex Server well. With USB 3.0 it's just as fast as internal storage.SlackMasterDoug - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Just FYI you can run plex on any x86 based Synology. I have it on my DS1512+ and it works just fine.This isn't supposed to be the cheapest option. As other comments have pointed out, this is for the person that just wants it to work with minimal care and feeding. I've set up plenty of freeNAS solutions that would be cheaper to build than what I have with my Synology. However, the ability to do basically nothing but updates for the past 2.5 years and have it all work is worth it. Plus its all self contained, uses little energy and is quiet.
SirGCal - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Ya, I'm all for doing it yourself anyhow but these Syn boxes can Plex without an issue. They cannot however do some of the other things I use them for but that's another topic a bit outside the scope of all this. Still your own rig can potentially do more and be more useful and obviously cheaper so if it works for you, that's the whole point. Sweet.peterfares - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
You and most people other than those who have a weird obsession with Synology.RandomThis - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
I always wonder if these "not worth the money, I can build one for 1/x the price" are troll posts, or if people are seriously comparing items the consumer can expect to just buy, plug in and use, versus something they have to research, build and maintain. When I buy synology units I don't pay $1000+ for the hardware, I pay for people to research and develop a solution that works out of the box in a form factor that I find appealing, that takes 10 seconds of my time to maintain. If I didn't work, didn't have kids, and had nothing better to do, I would keep building custom FreeNAS units. As things stand, I buy synology units instead.As for the "I can set up a custom solution in 30 minutes", No. Factor in the time you spend researching the hardware, OS, software, just to mention a few. And the first time you run into a problem in FreeNAS, prepare to put aside a few hours. Admittedly, I had a lot of fun when I put together my FreeNAS unit, however now my time is much too precious to waste on something as minor as NAS units. When I had free time to spare, I was not Synology's target market. Now I am.
Mech049 - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
I always wonder if these "not worth the money, I can build one for 1/x the price" are troll posts, or if people are seriously comparing items the consumer can expect to just buy, plug in and use, versus something they have to research, build and maintain. When I buy synology units I don't pay $1000+ for the hardware, I pay for people to research and develop a solution that works out of the box in a form factor that I find appealing, that takes 10 seconds of my time to maintain. If I didn't work, didn't have kids, and had nothing better to do, I would keep building custom FreeNAS units. As things stand, I buy synology units instead.As for the "I can set up a custom solution in 30 minutes", No. Factor in the time you spend researching the hardware, OS, software, just to mention a few. And the first time you run into a problem in FreeNAS, prepare to put aside a few hours. Admittedly, I had a lot of fun when I put together my FreeNAS unit, however now my time is much too precious to waste on something as minor as NAS units. When I had free time to spare, I was not Synology's target market. Now I am.
And to answer those "oh, your time is worth $800 for the time it takes to put together a NAS", Yes. That's the amount of money I would need to be paid to do something I do not have an interest in doing. Add the fact I wouldn't be spending time with my kids, and $800 is a very good deal.
Mech049 - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Apologies for the double post. Wouldn't stop loading when I tried to post on my iPad so I tried to post using my PC. Of course it posted on both devices... Mods please combine, or delete the first post if possible.edward1987 - Monday, February 1, 2016 - link
It is better to have a tool dedicated for purpose. Computer is like: what fits everything fits nothing. You get support , upgrades and cool functionality from Synology. Plus if you talk directly to SPAN dot COM you can get better deal than elsewhere!DanNeely - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
For the encryption performance graph, putting the non-encrypted performance numbers would be helpful. Not a huge deal with this one since there was minimal impact; but being able to see how large the penalty is without having to switch back and forth would be helpful on reviews of less capable models.And like I've commented previously; with current generation NASes growing from just boxes of disk drives into light weight general purpose servers as well, your tests really need to be expanded to capture at least some of that capability. I'd suggest running a web server and measuring how much light traffic on that impacts the rest of the devices performance and virtualization hosting abilities for models that offer it (still just QNAP?) at a minimum.
vLsL2VnDmWjoTByaVLxb - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
USB3 has CPU overhead far greater than any built-in storage overhead, isn't RAID aware, suffers from serious latency issues in comparison to SATA, and eats up a port that could be used for peripheral use. USB3 should be used for removable access primarily, and nearline storage secondarily.Not saying you are doing it wrong, but USB3 doesn't scale after the second disk is added. That's a serious problem.
vLsL2VnDmWjoTByaVLxb - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Sorry, that was meant as a response for JeffFlanagan's post above. :\JustaUsernameorWE - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Anyone have any idea when/if they'll put Rangeley in a 2bay unit? Not thrilled with the current 2 bay market.ganeshts - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Synology doesn't have one (yet), but the Seagate NAS Pro 2-bay should fit your needshttp://www.seagate.com/products/network-attached-s...
It is based on Rangeley too, albeit a 2C/2T model running at 1.7 GHz.
romrunning - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Is there any specs on how these perform when compare to a simple, business-class server that has 8-bays? Something like a Dell PowerEdge T320 that has the capability for 8 x 3.5" drives and includes a quad-port GB NIC can be had for basically the same price as the Synology here.These larger-cost 8-bay NAS machines have a high price tag, so a natural competitor (in terms of price) seems to be servers from the standard server vendors. So I would love to see how it actually compares.
peterfares - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Poorly. Their only advantages over a computer are smaller and more power efficient. People will talk about how it saves so much time but you have to save quite a lot of time to make up the difference in cost between a synology and a much cheaper and faster computer.romrunning - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I also would like to know if some of the poor network performance numbers shown by these selected NAS units are also present in a full server setup.I guess we'll never know because these review units likely come with caveats on what type of "competing" devices they can reviewed against.
dgingeri - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
An Atom processor, 8 bays, 2GB of memory, and 8 bays, for $1050. I could build better for less, and get more flexibility.peterfares - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
BUT YOU CAN SAVE SO MUCH TIME WITH A SYNOLOGY!!!!!Haha. Those peoples time must be worth a lot. And if it's worth that much, why are they going for a Synology and not something better?
rpg1966 - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
:rolleyes:DiHydro - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
My time, plus any employees or services I have on the NAS could cost me the initial price each *hour* if it goes down. So having one physical unit, with hot swap, and on the fly rebuild is worth the price in some cases.DigitalFreak - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
Not everyone is poor like you.chaos215bar2 - Wednesday, November 19, 2014 - link
I see a lot of comments like this, and I can only imagine you're assuming that:1) The NAS is only being used as a file server with the most basic setup.
2) Updates are not an issue.
I agree that building a custom NAS box is a fun project and can save a lot of money. However, not everyone wants to deal with the complications that can arise from setting up multiple services and keeping them up-to-date.
Say you want an email server. To install and fully configure Synology's Mail Station takes no more than 10 minutes. If you want webmail to go with it, just install a second package. There's almost zero setup required. Sure, you'll have more options on a generic Linux installation, but setting up a fully functional and securely configured email system takes quite a lot of research if you're just doing it one time.
Of course, all of that time spent properly configuring your custom-built server is worthless if you don't keep it up to date. As of DSM 5.1, Synology will automatically install either all updates or just security updates, and you know that the updated components have been tested and work together. I have never had a problem with a service going down due to a Synology update. With full Linux distributions, not so much. Most of the time updates work fine, but I would never trust something as critical as my primary email server to automatic updates.
shodanshok - Friday, November 21, 2014 - link
Hi,while I agree on the simplicity argument (installing postfix, dovecon and roundcube surely require some time), RedHat and CentOS distros are very good from an update standpoint. I had very little problems with many server (100+) administered over the past years, even with automatic update enabled. Moreover, with the right yum plugin you can install security updates only, if you want.
Nowadays, and with a strong backup strategy, I feel confident enough to enable yum auto-update on all server except the ones used as hypervisors (I had a single hypervisor with auto-update enabled for testing purpose, and anyway it run without a problem).
Sadly, with Debian and Ubuntu LTS distros I had some more problems regarding updates, but perhaps it is only a unfortunately coincidence...
Regards,
shodanshok - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Hi agree with people saying that similar units are primarily targeted at users that want a clean and simple "off-the-shell" experience. With units as the one reviewed, you basically need to insert the disks, power on the device and follow one or two wizards.That said, a custom-build NAS has vastly better performance/price ratio. One of our customer bought a PowerEdge R515 (6 core Piledriver @ 3.1+ GHz) with 16 GB of ECC RAM, a PERC H700 RAID card with 512 MB of NVRAM cache memory and a 3 years on-site warranty. Total price: about 1600 euros (+ VAT).
He then installed 8x 2TB WD RE and I configured it with a 11+ TB RAID6 volumes with thin LVM volumes and XFS filesystem. It serves both as a backup server (deduplicated via hard links and rsync) and as a big storage for non-critical things (eg: personal files).
Our customer is VERY satisfied of how it works, but hey - face the reality: a skilled people did all the setup work for him, and (obviously) he paid us...
Beany2013 - Thursday, November 27, 2014 - link
This is about the most sensible comment on this entire review.If his budget halved and he couldn't necessarily afford support from you on a regular basis (or at least wanted his hourly callout charge to be lowered) I'm guessing you'd be more tempted to push him in the direction of a device like this, though?
(I've been there, done that, and swapped out more than a few Windows SBS/standard+exchange boxes for Syno units over the last few years for this very reason, natch - the Windows license costs themselves pretty much pay for one of these)
eximius - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I have to agree with these previous two comments.I have an 1813+ sitting next to my heavily modded (aka needed to use a dremel) case with 15 hot swap disks (currently Linux + btrfs + samba & NFS). I have and use (and love) both. There are use cases for both, but I would certainly not hand my custom solution over to someone random and expect it to just work. I have automated updates and reboots (all hail "if [ -f /var/run/reboot-required ]") but occasionally something does not work right. No normal person is going to be able to figure that out in a reasonable amount of time.
Also 30 minutes to install and configure it yourself is total BS. I have saltstack and automated PXE installs at home and 30 minutes is still stretching it for me for a full stack install and configure. Linux + Samba + backup + updates + RAID and/or mdadm and/or zfs and/or btrfs installed and *configured* in 30 minutes is beyond optimistic, even for technical people. $800 does not cover 8 hours of my time, so ya, I recommend Synology for certain (mostly home/SOHO) scenarios.
I can expect my 70 year old dad to be able to keep his synology up to date, but not a Linux or BSD distro. That is just a ridiculous thing to expect.
DustinT - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Ganesh, thanks for the thoughtful review. I am very interested in seeing how SSD caching affects performance. Take 2 drives out, replace them with 240gb SSDs and retest. Synology is putting a lot of emphasis on ssd caching, and I will be making my buying decision largely based on that aspect alone.eximius - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
It depends on your use case. For large sequential transfers SSDs are not going to help you very much since a couple of spinning metal drives can easily saturate a gigabit link. If you need a lot more IOPS then an SSD cache will help you out here but only so much, since again the limit is gigabit ethernet (16000 IOPS or so).*note* this applies to gigabit links, 10+ gigabit ethernet or infiniband connected devices can see an improvement with SSDs.
mervincm - Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - link
Yes, please , test Read and Write Cache effect. In my 1813+ (4GB) on DSM 5.0 I installed a 2 disk Read/Write SSD Cache. Strangely streaming performance dropped, and since my use case is highly dependent on streaming, I removed the cache. I wonder now if things are better with 5.1 or with the read only cache.eximius - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
First, your bottleneck is the gigabit LAN. A couple of spinning rust drives can easily saturate a gigabit link so an SSD cache is not going to accelerate a streaming (aka sequential read) operation over gigabit ethernet. If you need more IOPS then an SSD cache will help (gigabit ethernet tops out somewhere around 16000 IOPS), though at the cost of reduced throughput.IOPS and throughput are at opposite ends of the spectrum, an increase in one means a decrease in the other. If your use case is sequential reads and writes, don't bother with the SSDs. On DAS (direct attached storage) you can improve both IOPS and throughput with an SSD cache since it takes a whole lot of platters to equal the performance of a single 850 pro SSD.
Also note that this problem has nothing to do with Synology, you have the same constraints even if you had 24+ thread CPU(s) and 128 GB+ RAM with <insert favourite redundancy technology here>. Gigabit ethernet is slow, period.
stevenrix - Thursday, November 20, 2014 - link
I actually own the DS1812+. I was going to build my own NAS but I wanted a hardware solution for the RAID, because software RAID is just too slow. Then I could not find the right type of tower I wanted for the drives, that was another issue, then I was not able to expand the RAID on the fly if I wanted to add more drives or even build a dynamic partition, so I decided to go with that solution instead. I haven't got one single problem with my unit that just reached 1 year now.There are far better solution in NAS but their price is extremely expensive, starting at 50K like the Equal Logics. This solution is for SMB or people like me that don't want to spend time on assembling parts for a NAS. Also for a good NAS with good parts might cost more money: just the RAID card in hardware (PERC 6 or 7) is $300 and some NAS run with Xeons procs.
meyergru - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
I have read the reviews about the Synology NAS devices with Avoton CPUs (DS1815+ and DS415+). Having bought one now myself, I wonder how far they have been tested.I got the impression from former Anandtech articles about the new Avoton CPUs, that NAS devices equipped with those should be able to encrypt data with virtually no performance impact. The reviews proved that point, so I bought one.
However, Synology offers only eCryptFS, which does not work via NFS and exhibits the file names and directory structures in the clear - also, the maximum filename lengths are truncated to 143 characters. Thus, using it for general backup purposes is somewhat pointless.
On a side note, it is a shame that the Synology kernel configuration does not even include the dm-crypt.ko and cryptoloop.ko modules and that there are no userspace cryptsetup or losetup executables. This limits the usefulness of the Synology Avoton line of products to almost zilch.
Also, the GPL sources under http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsgpl are out of date. There is no 5.1 version, which would contain the neccessary tools for the new Avoton machines like the DS1815+ and the DS415+. Thus, there is no self-cure for the situation, either.
This is the kind of improvement hints I have grown accustomed to in Anandtech reviews, but no word of it in the final words of these ones.
name99 - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
"Bay Trail is proving very effective in tablets"Seriously? Proof ...
Being used for such well known brands as Teclast and Onda and Voyo is not "proving very effective".
Intel's goal for 2014 was 40 million tablets. I'm guessing, since we haven't heard much since that goal was set (but we have heard about the 2014 billion dollar losses in their mobile division, complementing the 2013 billion dollar losses) that they didn't QUITE make that...
The Foxconn (oops, sorry, "Nokia") iPad mini clone MAY change that --- but that won't ship for another three months, and I expect Apple have a plan in the wings the moment they feel any pressure at the low-end to drop the A5 iPad mini, move the iPad mini 2 down to that price slot, and, if necessary, slide in an A8 based iPaid mini 4 at the high end...
Meanwhile Lenovo was so impressed with Bay Trail that they dropped it from the Yoga for the (much more expensive) Broadwell-Y, not that that has done them any good...
yuanshec - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
I recently search for a NAS and find this category is actually the most overpriced stuffs in the consumer market nowadays. There are not much hard technology needed to build one and the actual cost is not expensive. And I don't see much power saving compare to a dedicated computer with RAID, and this is not quiet at all. The only possible reason that this high price tag existed is there are not many players (yet) on the market.I would suggested waiting one more year and see what happens. Compared to this, even Macs or iPhone are not overpriced at all...agodzilla - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Synology DS1815+ only SATA / 1.5 Gbps speed will be newsin the spec DS1815+ have sata2 * 8
but slot 7 and slot 8 can't over the 1.5 Gbps (SATA1)
even SSD still can't over the 1.5 Gbps (150MB/s)
they not tell this problem before consumer buy it,is illegal in your country?
if the consumer know slot 7 and slot 8 can't over the 1.5 Gbps,they maybe not buy this product
this is our test video https://youtu.be/YDyEZKT_nAQ
you can confirm by yourself ,if you have DS1815+
and DS1813+ same problem ,is so many years
this will be big news,make Synology say sorry and compensate