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Waco
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Sat Jan 21, 2017 11:18 am

joselillo_25 wrote:
Waco wrote:
I bought mine straight up, and yes, the huge advantage is the flexibility and power.  That, and running FreeNAS (which is fairly straightforward) lets you run ZFS, which is awesome.  If you care about your data, ZFS is the only filesystem that I'd personally trust.  I have about 40 petabytes of ZFS-backed storage at work and it's saved my ass (and by my ass, I mean my user's data) more times than I can count.

I suppose you're joking :-)

Ha, no. Deploying another 45 PB in the next few months.
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Rapster
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Sat Jan 21, 2017 3:31 pm

Just checking in with a status....

TL/DR The Synology 1815+ is up and running.  And frankly I love it.  Needs a faster CPU.

While the setup was a breeze, it took about a week for things to stabilize. The first step was installation of 5 WD Red 6TB drives, and a memory upgrade module.  This was painless and took minutes.  After the build was complete, I connected the unit to the network and started the "DSM" admin console via a browser, which walked me through the process of creating a disk group, volumes, and formatting drives.  Easy.

The unit can use various flavors of RAID, but also provides Synology "Hybrid" RAID types that are similar to RAID 5 and 6 called SHR-1 and SHR-2 which provide a bit more flexibility.  I initially opted for SHR-1 with the intent of switching to SHR-2 (for added redundancy) once additional drives were added.  This was a mistake.  While it's possible to convert from RAID-5 to RAID-6, it is not possible to convert from SHR-1 to SHR-2.  I'll have to correct this later when I build another server and can copy the contents elsewhere while the rebuild occurs.

The next step was to consolidate content from a few different sources onto the Synology.  This is where I discovered my network was only running at 100Mb/s and that the universe would die from heat death before all the files finished copying.  This provided a nice excuse to by a new network switch :) and start over at 1000Mb/s.  I opted not to use link aggregation for improved performance and redundancy because it would require a switch more expensive than the $34 one that I bought and because... well... why bother. Once the copy started again, it could saturate the LAN and the Synology unit wasn't even breathing hard.  It's quite a little beast.  After several days the copy was complete but then I noticed that there was a considerable amount of disk activity... turns out it indexes all the media files and builds thumbnails, etc.  Its limited CPU makes this process run a LONG time.

The media indexing process ran for about a week before settling down, this produced quite a bit of heat and noise.  I could almost picture the little squirrels inside the box spinning all the disks around.  The trick here is that it looked like there were no (or at least a limited number of) media files when using the included media management applications.  It took me a while to realize that I just had to wait and let it finish.  Lots of people complain about nearly every aspect of this indexing process on internet forums.

The next step for me was to remove 2 6TB drives from my desktop computer and add them to the Synology array.  This was really painless, but the rebuild process took four days.  It would have taken six days, but I figured out that turning off media indexing and (oddly) shutting off my desktop computer really sped things up.

Finally I setup some backups.  All the computers in the house automatically backup to a volume dedicated to this purpose.  I also connected a 4TB external drive to the Synology to backup things that would be painful to lose as well as the backups. So now I have external and cloud backups of everything (even the backups) in addition to the RAID-5 redundancy.

So now the unit has 7 drives, and room for a hot spare (i'll order this before summer).  The media applications have finished indexing everything and I can enjoy all my movies, photos, and music anywhere I go... even my living room.  On the road, it feels a lot like a OneDrive account: all documents and media are easily and quickly available and can be shared and downloaded to my various devices.  Nice.

Final thoughts.  I really love this little guy.  My only wish is for a more powerful CPU to speed up rebuilds and media indexing. These processes take WAY too long and really impact usage.  I'll keep this in mind when I build my next server to replace this.
 
End User
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Sat Jan 21, 2017 6:23 pm

Waco wrote:
End User wrote:
The original post did not mention "consumer" products. The only person who started using the term "consumer" was you on the second page.

This thread is about the RS1815+. A unit that supports Btrfs, has a 3 year warranty, and has user replaceable parts. Based upon Synology's track record it will receive both security and OS updates well beyond its warranty period.

No, this thread is about the DS1815+. An 8 bay consumer NAS appliance.

You crack me up. Your previously documented points on the matter clearly disqualify the DS1815+ from being a "consumer" product.
 
DragonDaddyBear
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Sat Jan 21, 2017 7:05 pm

I wager there is a way for you to disable the thumbnail feature and save some CPU.
 
Waco
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Sun Jan 22, 2017 1:06 am

End User wrote:
You crack me up. Your previously documented points on the matter clearly disqualify the DS1815+ from being a "consumer" product.

Really? It's a $5k server like the one you linked? :lol:
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Waco
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Sun Jan 22, 2017 1:11 am

Rapster wrote:
The next step for me was to remove 2 6TB drives from my desktop computer and add them to the Synology array.  This was really painless, but the rebuild process took four days.

Ouch, 34 MB/s rebuild speed? Granted, it's a small array, but that's painfully slow. Was the CPU maxed out during the rebuild?
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Rapster
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Sun Jan 22, 2017 10:38 am

Waco wrote:
Rapster wrote:
The next step for me was to remove 2 6TB drives from my desktop computer and add them to the Synology array.  This was really painless, but the rebuild process took four days.

Ouch, 34 MB/s rebuild speed? Granted, it's a small array, but that's painfully slow. Was the CPU maxed out during the rebuild?


Good question Waco. Neither the CPU nor the Disk were maxed out. My sense of the situation was that the CPU just couldn't do the thumbnail generation fast enough and that this didn't really show up in the average-over-time performance reporting. But I could be wrong. Thoughts?
 
Rapster
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Sun Jan 22, 2017 10:40 am

Losergamer04 wrote:
I wager there is a way for you to disable the thumbnail feature and save some CPU.

You can, but disabling all the services doing indexing and thumbnail generation is not as straightforward as you might think. I decided to let them run instead of causing bigger problems for myself. ;)
 
End User
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Sun Jan 22, 2017 8:15 pm

Waco wrote:
End User wrote:
The original post did not mention "consumer" products. The only person who started using the term "consumer" was you on the second page.

This thread is about the RS1815+. A unit that supports Btrfs, has a 3 year warranty, and has user replaceable parts. Based upon Synology's track record it will receive both security and OS updates well beyond its warranty period.

No, this thread is about the DS1815+. An 8 bay consumer NAS appliance.


A product which has many of the features you desire based upon what you have written in this thread.
 
Redocbew
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Sun Jan 22, 2017 11:05 pm

If my NAS supported it I would still pick EXT4 over BTRFS even though it doesn't do checksumming. That's probably just my preference, but like I said earlier I'm not trusting the application to be infallible as I would a real server built to the task.
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AbRASiON

Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Mon Jan 23, 2017 2:07 am

I built a FreeNAS machine after finding Synology is simply too expensive.
FreeNAS9 is about as good as a Synology box but FreeNAS10 - may well become very very good as a media server / network file server.

When your synology machine dies (and it does happen!) it's a frantic hunt to find the same model or the new version, put your disks in and pray for an import.
With a FreeNAS machine you get your disks, put them in any machine you like as long as it has the SATA ports, boot from a USB key and import the volume.

FreeNAS 10 will be using 'docker' which means a boatload of powerful plugins.    Synology does plex and crashplan and blah blah but it actually stops eventually at a certain point and you can't get more.   Once you go FN10 with docker, the library of plugins will be EXTENSIVE.

I recommend building one to be honest, it took me a bit of research but I'm not that clever and I got it going, it's great.
I would recommend at least a 4 core cpu over 2.5ghz and made in the last 5 years,  16gb of memory and 6 SATA ports for ZFS2  (2 disk redundancy)
 
Rapster
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Mon Jan 23, 2017 9:10 am

AbRASiON wrote:
<snip>
I recommend building one to be honest, it took me a bit of research but I'm not that clever and I got it going, it's great.
I would recommend at least a 4 core cpu over 2.5ghz and made in the last 5 years,  16gb of memory and 6 SATA ports for ZFS2  (2 disk redundancy)


I've built many computers over the years, but this time I wanted an appliance. It's barely larger than the drives it holds and sits quietly on my bookshelf. Compared to the price of the drives, the unit's price was not really even a consideration and the weekends and evenings it freed up more than paid for itself.

That said, there are certainly downsides. Its CPU seems a bit underpowered and the portability issues you mentioned are very real. I've got doubly redundant backups for the important content and will likely add a small media server to address those issues.

In short, I'm VERY happy with the Synology 1815+ and would definitely buy the same thing again.
 
Waco
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Tue Jan 24, 2017 10:36 am

Rapster wrote:
Good question Waco. Neither the CPU nor the Disk were maxed out. My sense of the situation was that the CPU just couldn't do the thumbnail generation fast enough and that this didn't really show up in the average-over-time performance reporting. But I could be wrong. Thoughts?

Hm. I wonder what it's doing if it's not fully utilizing one or the other when rebuilding...

Does the interface expose raw bandwidth as well as IOPs per drive?

End User wrote:
A product which has many of the features you desire based upon what you have written in this thread.

Indeed, and my reservations about BTRFS stand. The rest of it seems to be up to snuff, but I maintain that a custom build is still a better option when you start spending $900 pre-disks.
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TravelMug
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Mon Feb 06, 2017 7:09 pm

Well, this will be interesting:

Intel's Atom C2000 chips are bricking products – and it's not just Cisco hit


Intel indicated in a January 2017 revision of its Atom C2000 family documentation that the chip line contains a clock flaw. Errata note AVR.54, titled "System May Experience Inability to Boot or May Cease Operation," explains that the Atom C2000 Low Pin Count bus clock outputs (LPC_CLKOUT0 and LPC_CLKOUT1) may stop functioning. Permanently.

Several Synology units will be affected by this including the 1815+
 
End User
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Mon Feb 06, 2017 7:42 pm

Waco wrote:
I maintain that a custom build is still a better option when you start spending $900 pre-disks.

What is your preferred storage management software solution?
 
Waco
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Re: Synology 1815+ or other?

Tue Feb 07, 2017 9:02 am

:P
End User wrote:
Waco wrote:
I maintain that a custom build is still a better option when you start spending $900 pre-disks.

What is your preferred storage management software solution?

FreeNAS, though not without its flaws, is fairly good if you're willing to invest a little time learning (which I maintain that anyone using any kind of storage stack should do).
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