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New DS212 - first impressions

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stevech

Part of the Furniture
I purchased a DS212 (not the DS212j). Not yet sold by Newegg, so I found a vendor on Amazon -$15 shipping for 2 day delivery from NV to CA.

I over-studied which NAS to buy for my home needs and chose the DS212 hoping that since it's new/fast that I'll be happy with it for several years.

I'm a hard sell and I expect high quality in the applications on the NAS; Stated otherwise, I'm tired of bad/crappy firmware so often found in consumer WiFi, and beyond crummy in Netgear's NAS I bought some time ago.

The DS212, after 3 days' familiarization and use, has exceeded my expectations in ease of use, speed and application robustness. The Ajax-based UI is amazing. I am delighted!
 
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Why didn't you go with the DS212+? I am curious because I am thinking of doing the same. The only differences I see with the DS212+ is

$100
2.0 GHz vs. 1.6Ghz
512 MB vs 256 MB
Windows ACL support

Is it worth the extra $100 for this?
 
I judged that the 212+ exceeded my needs, and $300 for the 212 was on the top of what I wanted to spend - given I need only a 2 drive unit. (I bought one of the first 212's I could find off the shelf).

Indeed, my decision was the 212 vs. a lesser 1.2GHz 2 drive product. I decided the speed and USB3 on the 212 made the difference.

The performance of the NAS is constrained by I/O, not RAM size. Moving big video files on the LAN can get to 50-80MBps but that's rare, where the other device is a PC.

Still very pleased with it after a couple of months. I setup mine with each of the two drives as independent volumes, no RAID. One is the master volume and one is the slave volume (2TB disks). Synology copy utilities make the slave match the master, and another utility keeps a time-machine backup of the master on the slave so I can revert up to 30 days on any file/folder.

The USB3 drive is the once a week or so backup that is to be kept off-site. It's NTFS so rather slow for writing, but if the worst happens, I have a plug-and-play USB drive to use with a PC.

The NAS' SD card slot has a card in at all times and it gets auto-backup of very important folders. Triple backup.

I think Windows ACL is in most all products using DSM 3.2.
 
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Sounds like you are perfect with your setup. I am in the same boat. Your method is almost a mirror of what I was going to do with my setup.

I am still trying to find out why someone would purchase the DS212+ over the DS212?

I am curious to know what they mean by an "effective backup solution" for the DS212 and a "complete backup solution" for the DS212+?

I can get the DS212+ from amazon for 369 and the DS212 for $299 (free shipping for both)
 
Check if the 212+ runs a different version of DSM 3.2 (their OS/GUI) than does the 212.
I doubt it.
You can call them in CA and ask a pre-sales question. I did, and got a prompt thoughtful response.
 
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The only situation that I can think of where the 212+ would be worth the extra money is for in an environment where you can have numerous files being accessed at the same time. So most likely a small office with multiple users.
 
stevech,

Most curious as to how you went about selecting the hard drives that now live in your DS212?
 
Drives...
I had a Seagate 2TB Green. I just used it; didn't check the "approved" list.
Then I added a second Seagate 2TB that was new, cheap, and 7200 RPM non-green.

THese are independent volumes, not RAID. the Main drive for all my shares is the 7200 RPM one. The green drive gets backups of the other drive.
 

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