Synology DS209 and DS209+II Reviewed

[samg]

Question for Tim and Craig about the Time Machine set up in your article. I thought Apple Talk was no longer a part of Snow Leopard. Is turning on AT only for <10.6?

There seem to be so many people having trouble in the Synology forums with Disk Station 2.2 and running Time Machine in Snow Leopard. Did you run it for a while, or just do the initial backup? I guess I'm surprised to hear someone say it worked.

Anyone else have any experiences to share? This is the last thing holding back from getting a Synology system.

Thanks,
Sam

 

[Craig Ellison]

Time Machine -

samg -

As I indicated, I only ran (or tried to run) it on 10.5.8. I haven't upgraded to Snow Leopard yet, though will probably do so soon.

The information that I received was from Synology who indicated that AFP had to be enabled for Time Machine to work. Indeed, without AFP enabled and the share hidden, the Time Machine UI didn't even see the Synology NAS.

Initially, Synology said that TM didn't work with anything less than 10.6, but then reported that it would work with 10.5 as long as the Mac didn't go to sleep. That wasn't my experience. I did an initial backup, and after that, Time Machine failed when trying to connect to the Synology NAS.

FWIW, Synology suggested that as a possible work around, you could enable iSCSI on the NAS and set it up a target. They provided the following link as free tool to mount the iSCSI target. I didn't verify it, however.

http://www.studionetworksolutions.com/products/product_detail.php?t=more&pi=11

In theory, the mounted iSCSI target should look like another disk to the Mac, and you should be able to select that as a time machine target.

I tried one other experiment this morning - I disabled disk quotas for my "time machine" user even though that user was 32GB under it's quota. I switched time machine to use the disk station as a target and it backed up successfully. However, I toggled back to the normal disk I use for TM backups and then back to the Diskstation, and it failed again.

I'm really not sure what apple talk has to do with the Mac "seeing" the diskstation as a target. I checked my network preferences, and AT wasn't enabled.

Frankly, I bought my DiskStation about 2 years ago long before the latest upgrade. I was pleased that my old unit got a firmware upgrade, though Synology has stopped upgrading the X06 products, I believe. I just use an external 500GB USB drive that I picked up at a Black Friday sale for my TM backups, so for me, Time Machine functionality in the Synology NAS wasn't (and wouldn't be) a deal breaker.

-craig-

 

[Unregistered]

DS209 RAM - 512MB or 256MB?

Is the 512 MB RAM for the DS209 a misprint? Synology's website still lists the DS209 w/256MB, and this is the only data point I've seen that quotes an increase in RAM from the 'first generation'.

 

[thiggins]

Is the 512 MB RAM for the DS209 a misprint? Synology's website still lists the DS209 w/256MB, and this is the only data point I've seen that quotes an increase in RAM from the 'first generation'.

You are connect. The DS209 has only 256 MB of RAM. Thanks for the catch. It has been corrected.

 

[ntm1275]

I've got the 209+II, and this one fast piece of kit

The new firmware 2.2 has loads of extra features

 

[Unregistered]

Jumbo frame slows Read? Synlogy DS209

If I read the charts it seems like 4k jumbo frames seems to give a nice write improvement 59.2 to 69.2 but it seems like it slows read 63.6 down to 48.9. Is this normal, correct info? Currious because I was looking at getting a switch that supports jumbo frames, but if it slows read performance then it's maybe not worth it. Any comments

Marcus

 

[Unregistered]

Could not get my time machine to work with my synology DS209j

I just tried this with my macbook pro (snow leopard 10.6.4) and got time machine to see the folder I created on my NAS disk, but when it tried ti back up my computer I was told that the following:
"/Volumes/time machine-1/Mads Møllers Macbook Pro.sparsebundle"
couldn't be created (error 13).
Does anyone know what I have to do to fix this?

Mads Moller