Anybody owns a Synology NAS?

Hi,

I'm thinking about getting a Synology DS216J (2 bay) NAS to stuff my HTPC disk in that is currently burning up in a usb enclosure sitting on some gloves to reduce noise (works great!) in 30+ degree ambient temperatures.

I've never owned one of these things so how does it work? Right now I got only 1 drive that is formatted as NTFS. Can I just boot up the NAS, plug in my already formatted disk holding all my data and expect it to work without having to do any formatting?

The specs page says NTFS is supported but googling shows a lot of old links with people complaining about NTFS performance being poor. Most of those are 3 or 4 years old. These things should be easily capable of streaming bluray-like files, right?

Doesn't have to do any fancy stuff, just want to use it as network storage for my HTPC
 
I have one (DS415+) and use it daily for backup and streaming video (HD) around house. I suspect the CPU and RAM in the various models makes a reasonable difference to how good they are but the one I have at least has been absolutely rock solid for 18 months (4x6TB drives raid 5 config) - it replaced a far more temperamental Drobo...

Can't answer your exact question as never tried plugging in a disk with existing data. They do have modes to operate as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) which may do what you want but would get someone who knows for sure to confirm. I've only used NAS boxes for RAID configurations to give some level of redundancy and I believe RAID configs are all going to want to format your disk before use (you can expand the raids without formatting - takes a while though).
 
Actually 10TB drives are now available.

For my NAS needs, I store mostly read only files such as movies, shows, and music. I don't need extreme performance. For this I run unRaid software. It's great for this and doesn't require proprietary hardware, just basic PC hardware. It uses standard Linux filesystems (BTRFS, XFS, or RFS) on each drive. It supports dual parity on the latest 6.2 RC so can recover all data from 2 drive failures. If you have more drives fail, you can still use the data from the drives that did not fail. It also supports Dockers and Virtual Machines and has a great community.

One downside to most custom hardware NAS is if that hardware fails you need to buy back into their hardware to get back your data.
 
I switched from my old WHS2011 server to a Synology 1813+ 5 bay which currently has 16tb of drives in their own RAID config. I also mainly use it for storing all my movies, TV shows and music, as well as family data with users.

Great OS that is frequently maintained and has a wide selection of apps and utilities to run on it. I have php, mysql or Kodi library, client backups etc.

It's very handy for expanding as I can slowly get rid of the 3tb drives that I'm replacing with 5's and 6's. I'm also considering getting a 2nd unit that expands to 10 drives.
 
@PixResearch: Thanks.

@Malo: Could you confirm what PixResearch said, can you just plug in a bunch of drives without having to format anything? I don't need RAID and I don't want to create one big storage pool. I just want to plug in my NTFS disk, plug another one in later and be able to share some of the folders on them so my HTPC can access them.

@Davros: Maybe getting something like a 2 disk USB enclosure is the better option. I'm only worried about the fan noise on those things. I live in a crappy one room apartment and the disks will be fairly close to my bed (2 meters or so). Thought about hooking it up to me router but then I remember this is Japan and everything in Japan has to be slightly different than products sold in the rest of the world so the shit Buffalo router I got doesn't support NTFS nor is it DD-WRT supported (which does support NTFS).
 
@Malo: Could you confirm what PixResearch said, can you just plug in a bunch of drives without having to format anything? I don't need RAID and I don't want to create one big storage pool. I just want to plug in my NTFS disk, plug another one in later and be able to share some of the folders on them so my HTPC can access them.
I don't believe you can do this with NTFS. AFAIK you can plug in external USB drives with NTFS but the drives in the enclosure itself are EXT4 by default and also support FAT32. NTFS is rather heavily licensed and they use a free slow one for compatibility only (pulling data onto the new volume).

What kind of drive is the current one? You really want NAS features on the drive for full operation on a NAS, especially when using some form of RAID. But I assume you don't care about redundancy and just want to JBOD it?
 
I'm now running a headless pfsense vm for DDNS/VPN on my HTPC and thought about offloading that to the NAS as its probably more stable than my W10 HTPC. Not that I had a lot of issues with that, its just that sometimes it has a tendency to hang during reboot, requiring a hard reset.

But yes, I mostly want it to just hold my drives and not do anything else. I don't need raid as the files on that disk aren't that important.

If most NAS' don't really do NTFS I think I'll look for a usb enclosure. I don't have enough disk space to backup my HTPC disk and format something else and I don't really want to buy an additional disk just for that because I still got about 1TB left so the other disk will just be sitting there unused.
 
So how come linux supports it ?
Anyone can support it. That support can come in various degrees of compatibility and performance depending on what kind of implementation and how much they've paid for that licensed implementation. Synology NAS is basically a linux server however they use a free NTFS implementation and it's quite slow.
 
As Azbat said, I have one.

I've got a DS214 and I love the hell out of it, it's the best thing I've ever purchased and use it for far more than simple network storage. Having said that, I'm not sure about your specific question. My guess is that what you would really want to do is buy the DS216 and the additional drive (the "2" should represent 2 drive bays), and set up the DS216 with the new drive. Once you've installed the DSM software on the new drive and configure the NAS, you'll have options to add the additional drive and should be able to save all the files that exist on it.

Like I said, I'm not positive about that, but I've my 6TB of storage on my DS214 are getting close to max and I've been looking at expanding. Since my drives are currently in Raid-0, it's a difficult task. But from what I've read about my situation, the solution is to buy the expanded unit and begin with a virgin drive and then add the others with data after the initial configuration. I would imagine the process would be similar for your situation.

Two things I've learned that I'd like to share with you regarding a Synology NAS (and maybe not specific to Synology).

First - Make care to note the processor. Many "packages" for Synology are available, but they are all processor specific. You might read a guide that shows you how to do certain things only to find out that there isn't a package readily available for your specific chipset. As you are looking at a DS216, it could be that many things that DS214 owners can do, you cannot. (If you are just using this as pure network storage and aren't running any software on the NAS itself then you can ignore this.)

Second - Expansion. The DS216, like my DS214, is not expandable. You are stuck at 2 drives, and that is it. Other models, allow for expansion units via eSata. Now, this isn't exactly true because you can still expand your storage through USB but the DSM won't "see" the expansions are part of the same file source, so you'll have to be selecting different file sources for your different drives. This means if you're running something like Kodi, you'll have to manually segregate your different file types to the different devices because they won't be recognized as one cohesive unit.

It's just something to consider, I didn't really think I'd burn through 6 TB of storage, but 2 or 3 years later, yep.

I guess the thing that I want you to take away from this is that Synology is hyped so much because they have their own DSM and their own file systems, they're own software RAID implementations, etc. So that other people's experiences with NAS are not necessarily going to translate or be helpful.

My advice? Buy the DS216 (as long as you realize that expanding beyond 2 drives will be difficult) and your new second drive, set it up with the virgin drive and then plug in your existing drive. When you go into the DSM it will give you options on how to configure that new drive and it will say if you do such and such this will delete all existing files or not. However, I'd also like to add that if it does "merge" them together the process will likely take hours to complete, so make sure you have a UPS so that nothing happens during this lengthy conversion process.

I don't know if any of that helped, and honestly, if you aren't going to run any of the synology packages or take advantage of the system being more than just "Network attached storage" there are many far cheaper solutions for you to consider as well.

+
 
just read a quote about some drives and it said one of the models is designed for nas
how does a nas drive differ ?
 
just read a quote about some drives and it said one of the models is designed for nas
how does a nas drive differ ?

TLER settings. Other drives may call it ERC or CCTL.

Some other differences are in vibration sensing and control.

If you don't know what that setting means (TLER), have a quick read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control

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It is best for TLER to be "enabled" when in a RAID array to prevent the recovery time from a disk read or write error from exceeding the RAID implementation's timeout threshold. If a drive times out, the hard disk will need to be manually re-added to the array, requiring a re-build and re-synchronization of the hard disk. Enabling TLER seeks to prevent this by interrupting error correction before timeout, to report failures only for data segments. The result is increased reliability in a RAID array.

In a stand-alone configuration TLER should be disabled. As the drive is not redundant, reporting segments as failed will only increase manual intervention. Without a hardware RAID controller or a software RAID implementation to drop the disk, normal (no TLER) recovery ability is most stable.

In a software RAID configuration whether or not TLER is helpful is dependent on the operating system. For example, in FreeBSD the ATA/CAM stack controls the timeouts, and is set to progressively increase the timeouts as they occur. Thus, if a desktop disk without TLER starts delaying a response to a sector read, FreeBSD will retry the read with successively longer timeouts to prevent prematurely dropping the disk out of the array.
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The ZFS filesystem was written to immediately write data to a sector that reports as bad or takes an excessively long time to read (such as non TLER drives); this will usually force an immediate sector remap on a weak sector in most drives.
 
I have one (DS415+) and use it daily for backup and streaming video (HD) around house. I suspect the CPU and RAM in the various models makes a reasonable difference to how good they are but the one I have at least has been absolutely rock solid for 18 months (4x6TB drives raid 5 config) - it replaced a far more temperamental Drobo...

Second recommendation for Synology, I have the DS412+ (the 2012 version of the 415) and it's never been switched off, it just runs quiet and just works. I'm using the stock SHR filesystem and have upgraded the storage capacity many times. Yank a disk out, put a new/larger disk in, the Synology rebuilds the RAID array automatically.
 
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