My First Synology NAS, the DS-410j

[DonB]

I have always been a fan of building my own NAS. I have dabbled with various Mini-ITX motherboards and *nix distros over the years. Up until a couple weeks ago I had been running freenas based C2D based NAS with 4x500 and 2x1TB drives. This NAS was good for ~70Mb/s peek throughput performance.

My push towards an appliance was due to a recent electricity bill. Due to a new tax and an increase in electicity rates, I received a bill that was 20% over my highest previous bill. I immediately decided to invest in lower power equipment.

I was contemplating a Qnap TS-419P or a Synology DS-410j. I was leaning towards the Qnap but then newegg.ca dropped the pricing on the ds410j dramatically for the diskless version so that’s what I went with. With this appliance I was going to use 4 WD Caviar greens that I already owned (WD10EADS).

The NAS came in and I built it up the same day it arrived. I staged it in my office on my desk. Build quality of this device is excellent. The second thing I noticed once I powered it up was that even though this device has four 1 TB drives in it; it was oscillating less than my LaCie Quadra 1 TB external hard drive. This was my first clue that this is a first class device.

Let's get to the nitty gritty, performance, 250Mbits (27-31 MB/s) of throughput is what you'll get from this NAS. What I find most amazing about the performance is how consistent it is across all protocols. Samba, AFP, nfs, the performance is almost identical. As far as I am concerned this is acceptable performance. (Sure faster is awesome but you must pay for performance)

The DSM. I am most impressed. This is probably the best management interface I have come across for any appliance and I have played with, and I have played with many (especially professionally). What you get with the DSM far exceeds what you should expect from a $330 appliance.

I have also played with the surveillance station & the download station. Both work exactly as advertised and my wife loves the fact that she can peek in at our son when he's playing in the basement from her iPhone anywhere in the house. The only con I have for the surveillance station is it costs $50 for every camera you want to add after the first. I understand this is likely cheap for a business but it’s rather pricy for a consumer application.

Overall I am very pleased with the Synology DS-410j. It is a very capable NAS server that provides a feature set that far exceeds its price tag.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this server to anyone looking for a home NAS.

 

[eikka]

Let's get to the nitty gritty, performance, 250Mbits (27-31 MB/s) of throughput is what you'll get from this NAS. What I find most amazing about the performance is how consistent it is across all protocols. Samba, AFP, nfs, the performance is almost identical. As far as I am concerned this is acceptable performance. (Sure faster is awesome but you must pay for performance)

I have tested the performance of my 410j here:
http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=4035

I found that the ftp service provides the best download speeds, which are way above SMB or even iSCSI. I have managed to get almost 50 MBps downloads through FTP whereas I have capped around 35 MBps with SMB. Based on tests, I have been expecting close to 50 MBps performance also for SMB and I am trying to find bottlenecks that prevent 410j from reaching that performance level.

 

[jcn]

Either I'm reading them too quickly or some of the reviews of the Synology devices don't clearly indicate whether they're talking megabits (Mb) or megabytes (MB). I'm inclined to believe the both of you, but I'm pretty sure in reading a review of the DS410j I saw somewhere that read performance topped out at 18MB, and it looks like you guys are doing quite a bit better.

With that said, I'm looking at the 2011 models myself - they just started selling the 411j for $375, but no sign of the 411. Considering the processor's been bumped from 800MHz to 1.2GHz, there should be a substantial improvement in performance to begin with. Given that I'll be using the device mostly for streaming video and serving up photo files, etc. to internet visitors - if given the option, would you pony up the extra for the 411 knowing what you know now, or do you think the added HP in the 411j should do the trick?

(Should point out, gigabit network, mostly hardwired clients with a couple of N laptops, and a 20Mbit upload pipe for internet visitors).

Thanks!

 

[eikka]

With that said, I'm looking at the 2011 models myself - they just started selling the 411j for $375, but no sign of the 411. Considering the processor's been bumped from 800MHz to 1.2GHz, there should be a substantial improvement in performance to begin with. Given that I'll be using the device mostly for streaming video and serving up photo files, etc. to internet visitors - if given the option, would you pony up the extra for the 411 knowing what you know now, or do you think the added HP in the 411j should do the trick?

Don't know really. My tests showed that the 410j processor is not the bottleneck. With all my tests, I had about 40% processor load (except with simultaneous UL/DL test when it was something like 60%) and 40-50% memory consumption. I suspect that the variety of configurations for network topologies and clients cause trouble with some of the 410j daemon implementations. For example I get nearly 50 MBps performance with Google Chrome browser's FTP client, but around 30-40 MBps with iSCSI and SMB with my 32-bit Vista system and yet the processor is not maxed..

 

[jcn]

Don't know really. My tests showed that the 410j processor is not the bottleneck. With all my tests, I had about 40% processor load (except with simultaneous UL/DL test when it was something like 60%) and 40-50% memory consumption. I suspect that the variety of configurations for network topologies and clients cause trouble with some of the 410j daemon implementations. For example I get nearly 50 MBps performance with Google Chrome browser's FTP client, but around 30-40 MBps with iSCSI and SMB with my 32-bit Vista system and yet the processor is not maxed..

Thanks - that's useful feedback. That's one of the reasons I'm on the fence here. It's not as if I bought speedy hard drives to populate the device with (bought 5400 RPM Samsung Spinpoint F4's, which aren't exactly speed demons). At the same time, I plan to use all of the application functionality, so it's not just transfer times where I'm worried about CPU utilization, it's also during BT use, or media streaming, etc.

If it were possible to get a 411+ for a little less, I think I'd be done with my decision by now, but knowing it's that much more expensive than the 411j I'm reluctant to pony up almost twice as much and then find out I'm disk bound.

 

[-BA-]

Thanks - that's useful feedback. That's one of the reasons I'm on the fence here. It's not as if I bought speedy hard drives to populate the device with (bought 5400 RPM Samsung Spinpoint F4's, which aren't exactly speed demons). At the same time, I plan to use all of the application functionality, so it's not just transfer times where I'm worried about CPU utilization, it's also during BT use, or media streaming, etc.

If it were possible to get a 411+ for a little less, I think I'd be done with my decision by now, but knowing it's that much more expensive than the 411j I'm reluctant to pony up almost twice as much and then find out I'm disk bound.

This is a dilemna I am facing too at the moment. The 411+ is really just that bit more than i would like to spend but and as such I am actually now looking at the 410 not the 410j. The 410 seems to have close to the performance levels of the 411+ but I guess last years model.

Any feedback from 410 users would be welcome.

 

[-BA-]

Well I finally bit the bullet and went for the 410. It was so much cheaper than the 411+ and more suited to my needs than the 410j. Managed to get it for £336 + 3% Quidco after using a £20 off voucher and free delivery at dabs.com. Pretty happy with that and can't wait to get it set up now.