Topic: cool NAS server

[sparkey]

Here is a cool little network attached storage box that has media integration, backups, surveillance and RAID array.  Pretty neat.

http://www.synology.com/dsm/index.php?lang=us

[dnsacks]

I've been running a Synology ds1511+ using this dsm system for around 3 weeks now and thought I'd provide my initial observations

I picked this up after my inexpensive 4 bay esata raid box decided to fail on me without warning, bringing down my 6tb raid 5 array.  Although I was able to recover 99% of its contents via backups/etc., I decided to upgrade to a more robust solution for a few reasons.  First, my old raid was slow -- around 10mb/s write and 15mb/s read.  Second, given its falure, I was now "scared" of it.  Finally, I wanted room to expand.

The ds1511+ was not cheap, it ran me $800 for the bare (no drives) unit.  However, it provides 5 drive bays (versus 4 for most raid boxes), enabling me to expand my raid 5 array to 8tb, and contains esata ports with port multiplier capabilities, that both interface with the synology dx510 5 bay expansion units (allowing for up to 15 drive arrays) or, I later found, other esata raid boxes (as it serves as a port multipler). 

Now that it's up and running, I've found it to be extremely fast, basically maxing out my main computer's sata drives at around 80mB/second read and write, quiet, and easy to configure and monitor.  I've set up its included filestation utility to allow friends access to its files (a cool feature on that software is the ability to single click download an entire directory as a zip file), have it running as my squeezebox server, and am monitoring its drives SMART status through email notifications. 

It's probably far more than I need, but has been such a smooth implementation that I'm happy with my outlay.  I've filled it with 4x wd eads 2tb drives and a 2tb hitachi (fwiw)

[sparkey]

Thanks for the feedback - how are you testing the throughput of the array?

[dnsacks]

I'm observing throughput by monitoring the transfer speeds displayed in windows 7 (or the teracopy app) while copying files to/from the array across my gigabit network.  Is there a more objective way to do this?

[sparkey]

dd is a good one for this, probably better than hdparm:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_%28Unix%29
To make drive benchmark test and analyze the sequential read and write performance for 1024 byte blocks :

 dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1000000 of=file_1GB
 dd if=file_1GB of=/dev/null bs=64k


http://www.stevefortuna.com/check-disk-speed-quickly-and-easily-in-linux/
I generally use hdparm to test the speed of disks in Linux. The command I use is:

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

This quickly tests the throughput, but I thought I’d share another method which actually puts more strain on the disk.

Simply using dd you can run this command to see the write speed:

dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1048576 count=2048

and then this command to check the read speed:

dd if=test of=/dev/null bs=1048576

What this does is write 2G of zeros to a file in the first command, and then reads that file in the second command.

Pretty basic, simple, yet useful.