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Hardware Synology DS210+ Review

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by CardJoe, 25 Oct 2010.

  1. CardJoe

    CardJoe Freelance Journalist

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  2. Mraedis

    Mraedis Minimodder

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    Sounds cool, but still, lots of $$
     
  3. Crunch77

    Crunch77 What's a Dremel?

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    I bought the budget DS210J, and I'm extremely pleased with it. Fits our household needs perfectly. Awesome userinterface.
     
  4. Fractal

    Fractal I Think Therefore I Mod

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    Most decent modern HDDs can come close to utilising the full bandwidth of 1Gb/s Ethernet. None of the NASs benchmarked can come close (barely beating USB 2.0 speed) and as such are no good to me. Not to mention the exorbitant prices...

    Speaking of prices. For the price of this NAS I could build an i5-650 based system with 8GB of RAM and space for 8 HDDs. Can Bit-Tech ask the manufacturers how they justify the prices of what should be commodity hardware?
     
    Last edited: 25 Oct 2010
  5. xaser04

    xaser04 Ba Ba Ba BANANA!

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    Looks like a good piece of kit with plenty of features but the price is just ridiculous.

    £300 and it doesn't include a HD is just taking the proverbial.
     
  6. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    sorry to burst your bubble, the system you've listed will not cost £300, the CPU + RAM + mobo will, what about good power supply and a suitably sized case?

    also, what do you need speed for? NAS last word is storage, so as long as it can reliably hold your data and allow easy access whenever/wherever you need it, then why do you care about speed?

    don't know about your disks, usual writing speed for eco/green disks are 70MB/s, last time i checked that's not yet saturating the 1Gbps ethernet cable.
     
  7. Fractal

    Fractal I Think Therefore I Mod

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    Sorry to correct you but the system I listed (including decent PSU and case) will cost less than $900 NZ, which is what the DS210+ retails for.

    Put two such eco/green discs in RAID 1 and your sustained read performance should be around 140MB/s, which does saturated gigabit ethernet.

    As for why I would want that speed: Streaming HD video smoothly to multiple devices, backing up computers to it without having to wait all year, seeding and leeching torrents and most likely doing several of those things at once. Storage IO and bandwidth are the biggest limitations in my systems.
     
  8. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    £300 is the price in question here, and for £300, only CPU + mobo + RAM can be bought.

    putting drives in RAID 1 does not speed things up, last time i checked, it doesn't offer any performance advantages. RAID 0 will speed things up, but no one would want to risk their data in RAID 0.

    streaming HD video does not saturate 100Mbps ethernet, i've done it successfully with 10/100 router. backing up should be down at night when file isn't being accessed, seeding/leeching off torrents is tiny amount of data due to internet speed limitations. so 50MB/s is more than enough.
     
  9. Fractal

    Fractal I Think Therefore I Mod

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    The price in question is what it can be bought for in whatever country the potential customer is in. Here in mine it looks extremely uneconomic.

    Properly executed RAID 1 does speed reads up as a sector can be read from alternate drives giving RAID 1 a read speed comparable to RAID 0. You are right that RAID 0 is a silly idea though.

    HD video and torrents are relatively small bandwidth activities, as you say. However backing up should be done during the day, allowing all ones computers to be shut down overnight to conserve energy. The NAS and networking components are the only things that should be left running 24x7.
     
  10. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    agree to disagree?

    this is one of the fastest NAS you can buy, and with probably best user interface you can get on NAS systems.

    if this NAS cannot achieve your speed, then you really should look at a custom build. however, storage limitations in a PC system is completely different from speed limitations in a storage device. and a word of advice, you do not want your infrastructure to be saturated because when it does, even your internet will be very, very slow. (had that happen before i bought my gigabit router)

    i am perfectly happy with a Ds410j, budget 4 bay model by Synology, it still has all the fantastic software, only downside is it has about 3/4 of this Ds210+ read/write speeds. but i don't do over-network backup (since all data is already on there), only do backup internally from RAID5 to single drive overnight (in case controller decides to give up). streaming 1080p HD contents to 3 machines was no problem, which covers pretty much all i need it to do.
     
    Last edited: 25 Oct 2010
  11. Fractal

    Fractal I Think Therefore I Mod

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    Indeed, no device can suit everyones usage patterns. So long as what you have works for you :)
     
  12. Salty Wagyu

    Salty Wagyu moo

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    I used to have an old Synology 1xHDD NAS but eventually stopped using it due to a few annoying issues, one of them was when I wanted to extract, say, 8GB of files. It would copy it to my PC, extract and copy it back to the NAS. This added way too much extra time just to extract. Have today's NAS devices improved in that area at all?
     
  13. wyx087

    wyx087 Homeworld 3 is happening!!

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    i've used DSM 2.3 and DSM 3.0, both firmware allows you to select RAR/ZIP (may be others) file and let it extract in its current directory. currently, i simply let it download stuff, and access my NAS from work to select Extract, and files will be ready when i get home.

    one feature i'd love to have is "Extract here" option available in the drag menu, so that i can extract from download folder (in my single drive volume) directly into appropriate folders on my RAID 5 volume. eg. extract a TV show directly into TV show folder, rather than extract locally, then copy it to another volume.
     
  14. Crunch77

    Crunch77 What's a Dremel?

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    I always use Right-click- extract to.
     
  15. hexx

    hexx What's a Dremel?

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    nope you can't. and when it comes to power consumption you're left with no options.
     
  16. Fractal

    Fractal I Think Therefore I Mod

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    Read up the comments, I've already had this argument. The synopsis is that in my country I CAN. Power consumption is a good point, however I could just get an Atom-based mini-ITX 'board and it'd be similarly low-power while being less than half of the hardware price.
     
  17. hexx

    hexx What's a Dremel?

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    i've read other comments that's why i pointed out only power consumption, nothing else - i've gone through the same thinking as you and still haven't decided what to do :) if I should get a nas or buy older mac mini and hook external drives to it (i've got a big one on usb and could get a raid box on firewire) which would cost me slightly more than a good nas + disks.

    my main concern is of course price but more importantly it's consumption and noise.
     
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