I asked this on the PC Pro forum but only got one response (it seems to be a dying forum like MacUser was), just wondering if anyone had used this device here?

Hi, I'm thinking of purchasing a Synology DiskStation DS411j to serve a small home-office network of 2 desktops (2 macs, 2 pcs), redundancy and backup being the most important factor, with the main use being as a central store for files.

Just had a WD mirror backup drive die, (apparently "unheard of" - 1 HD of the pair dying 2 days after the other in the pair, before we had time to get a replacement to the first dead HD = significant data loss of some irreplaceable RAW photos, but fortunately not work stuff, which is triple backed up onto two other machines).

Does Synology use it's own disk format? It is possible to remove a disk from the system and connect it direct to access from a PC in an emergency or is the format unreadable directly? (Trying to cover all bases, what if the hardware in the DiskStation fails and you need immediate access to data on the drives?)

Are there any users on here of the Diskstation DS411j? Is it worth the money, or is this overkill for my needs. I was going to fill it with 4 x 2TB drives (to give 4TB mirrored), but with the vast increase in HD prices over the past couple of weeks, we'll hold off for a few weeks).

I'm afraid I've never used the Synology. I guess it uses a Linux format such as ext3 for the disks, so data recovery may be tricky but not impossible depending on the RAID configuration.


It's not unheard of - in fact it's positively normal. You have two identical drives born on the same day, living identical lives in an identical environment. You might say they are mirror image of each other. (pun intended)

I'm sure you've heard "Raid Is Not A Backup" - glad to hear your work stuff was safely backed up to multiple devices; very sensible.

Personally, I'm using a HP MicroServer (£200 + VAT plus £100 cash-back) which has 4 hot-swap drive bays. It doesn't come with any software configured though, so it's a DIY Linux box. I'd heartily recommend it though, because you can configure it to do whatever you want. It is significantly physically larger though.

What I would not recommend from poor personal experience is the Qnap - my boss has a TS219P and it's terribly unreliable, particularly at recovering after a power failure.

Not one of those specifically, but I have the DS411Slim, which is pretty much the same just using 2.5" rather than 3.5" drives.


I think the effective answer is 'yes'. It can hold data on the disk in various forms. If you go for RAID 5 or JBOD, definitely so - because no one disk holds a complete copy of the data. if you go for mirrored disk, you at least do have a copy of the data on the drives, however I'd be willing to assume the disks are formatted in some form of linux friendly format (given the thing is basically a linux PC with some bits shaved off) rather than in NTFS or FAT. You might be able to read the data IF you set it up right and IF you're lucky, but it'd be safer to assume the drives are locked to the device, or at least incompatible with anything other than another Synology NAS box.


The manual says in that situation you pull all the drives out, get another Identical NAS server and plug the drives into that. As long as you get the order right, it should just boot up and act exactly as the old one did.


I've found my 411slim to be very useful. It shares data very effectively, works as a Time Machine drive and has some other useful features like the sharing of photos and music, plus it's a useful downloading host - you can schedule downloads on it via HTTP,FTP & BIttorrent so it can do them at say 3AM when your provider network isn't as busy. The admin interface is elegant and very usable. I'd agree that right now is not the best time to be buying any sort of storage though.

You can back up a 411 series via USB (i.e. you plug a USB drive into the NAS itself) so you can have a secure offsite backup that way. Or to a second 411 over the network, although that is serious overkill for HO use.

The 411 series can support a mixed set of drives as JBOD, so if you have any old 3.5" SATA drives hanging around (even in external drive enclosures you could crack the drive out of), you could plug them in and get the bigger capacity drives as prices get more sensible. As long as you only swap one drive at a time, it shouldn't give you any trouble.

Jon

From reading the specs on the Synology site:



From that I understand that the unit will use the ext4 format.


From the X404 Open Source Glossary

You'll be able to read/write ext4 in any Linux distro released after October 2008 but not in Windows and read-only in OS X.

Hope this helps

Brilliant thanks so much for the replies above, it seems to do everything I need (vast amount of my storage are RAW image files, and serving both PC and Mac systems), I do use RAID as a backup for these type of files , as a days shooting on a 5DII generates many gigs of RAW files, to which there isn't any useful removable storage backup medium, even Blu-ray is hopelessly lacking in capacity, especially when you compare the price with (well a few weeks ago) HD. And as for the cloud, uploading these files over ADSL, well it's just not even an option!

All crucial work and docs I backup in at least 3 different ways, including on multiple USB sticks, dropbox, and duped on various machines, but this isn't really possible with the images I'm working with nowadays, they are just far too large.

With a new SAN/RAID box I want to ensure one of each pair is either a different manufacturer or just from a different batch, still I won't be using WD again, I've never ever had a HD fail on me before, so I've been fortunate. I will try a full recovery if I can get one to even spin up, but only when I've got a lot of extra storage on hand.

I know very little of Linux today, but having suffered data loss, I want to ensure there is always another way of accessing the files in case of a serious failure. I'm not sure I'll ever use half of the features on the Synology, but they may come in useful in the future. At least with it appears they could be read-only via OS X, which would be ok in an utter meltdown.

I ruled out Drobo (mixed reviews, some love, some hate), so thanks also for the info on Qnap, but I might have a look at the Netgear NAS boxes too, some have had good reviews.

Ideally need it v. soon, but am still waiting to see if HD prices drop a bit after the recent Thai disaster price rises.

If you don't need the storage immediately, I would wait.

Due to the flooding in Thailand, the prices of hard drives have more than doubled in the last month! I bought a 2TB WD model for 65€ in August, the same drive is now over 180€!

On the business side, the Seagate SAS drives have reached $3/GB (for a 74GB drive), whilst SSDs are coming down, OCZ's server SSDs cost around $1.68/GB, meaning the flooding in Thailand has made SSDs cheaper than traditional HDs in the server market!

I have a DS211J and I'm sure it let me use NTFS. I sould just be able to pop the HDD in a PC if I wanted. (I don't use RAID.)

Just wanted to update this to say I'm now running a DS212j with two 2GB HDs and it's absolutely fantastic (HDs were two expensive at present to go for the 4 bay version) - best bit of kit I've bought in years, haven't explored a tenth of it's features, but am very impressed, it's fast enough to serve up large photos and files across my gigabit network, the DSM software is excellent.