Customer Reviews

Synology DiskStation 4-Bay 2 TB (2 x 1 TB) Network Attached Storage DS410j 2100 (White)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I bought this hoping to turn off an old desktop that I was using as a NAS. The desktop was using a whopping 300W continuous and the RAID was software (windows) which scared the daylights out of me.

So, I bought this with two 750GB drives, running RAID-1, with plans to upgrade to RAID-5 in the future when I need the extra space.

The setup was easy, the machine is whisper quiet (though I don't know about putting it in a livingroom, mines in the laundry room) and uses about no power. I run it with power stand-by and scheduled power-down and both work perfectly. I put a power meter on the device and it uses, as advertised, in the 20W range.

I run SVN on it, following the instructions on Synology's wiki. Simple. No problems.

The only problem I've had was that one of the disks "hiccuped" one long enough for the RAID controller to call it dead. I simply told it to rebuild and haven't had a problem since. And I've been using this for about 2 months now. The hiccup is something to do with a timeout that's configurable on the drives but unless it gets worse I'm not going to even look into it. And yes, I'm a senior software engineer so have no fear of such a thing but also don't mind not doing the work and just keeping calm when the device tells me "a disk has crashed". No, it hasn't.

It did send me e-mail when that happened, which is nice because even though it beeps, it's in the basement.

So, I love it. Everyone with any amount of information they want to keep should have one of these. The money? Buy the best, cry once, get on with your life. I haven't had to think about this machine since day one (with the one exception) and am really loving that security.

Pros: all forms of RAID (and you can switch between them), upgradeable (more and/or larger disks), good support (wiki, forums, traditional tech support), quiet, very-low power consumption, Linux underneath so you can act as a light-weight application server (iTunes, SVN, etc), pretty, well-built, gives peace-of-mind.

Cons: price compared to other NAS systems. But read their reviews. Don't about half the reviews talk about problems. You buy this device so you can feel secure about your data.

I'm a huge fan and believe it or not, I hate computers.

Received it a few days ago, perfectly packaged.

I installed 3 1.5 TB Samsung drives and went on to set it up. I'm using Linux Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop.
This is one of the rare company who provide a Linux package for Setup Installation.

The installation was a breeze, specifying the firmware to install and on we go. I then configured the 3 drives in RAID-5 through the Web UI. The detailed formatting took about 10 hours (I could have chosen quick, but I wanted to make sure everything was properly checked).

After that, creation of shared folders accessible through my windows and Linux machines, setting up the Media Server to be accessed by my PS3s went without problems.

I transfered all the non-backed up files I had from an external USB HDD to this NAS via the USB ports. The good thing is it doesn't require copy through your PC, so you can let it run and unplug your laptop.

So far, I'm very happy with the product as a Home NAS. If my need were for a small company, I would go to higher models, but this is perfect for what I need.

I purchased this device from Amazon after reading several reviews from Amazon, CNET, and Newegg. I purchased this device because I wanted one device that could do multiple things without spending a lot of money. I am happy to say after having this device for several months that I have had no major issues with it. The way I use the device

1)I used the provided backup utility to backup my information on the computer. You can specify what folders you would like to back up. I have Windows 7 ultimate on my desktop and Win 7 home professional on my laptop. Ultimate allows me to backup to a remote server, my 410j and even created a system image disk, professional on the other had does not. You have to have the business edition or greater to have that feature which I hate. Most computers you will buy come with home professional so you will have to buy and upgrade from Microsoft or use this bad boy. I have restored files once when windows update crashed my system and I was able to get all my files back with the synology provided solution.

2)Media Center. This item was DLNA compliant. Which means that you are able to store videos, pictures and music on the device. I have it shared out to my PS3 and watch movies, even 720p HD, over my wireless G network. I have a Netgear WNDR3700 that I use, because it has Gigabit connections and it is connected to my desktop and 410j. I only get skipping when I try to watch 1080p movies, I assume cause of the bandwidth I get from my G network, but I am able to stream videos and music. I was also able to use this as my iTunes library once I set it up. I have close to 300GB of music from my personal collection that I converted to mp3. After some searching on the Apple site I was able to use this as my default library among my desktop and laptop.

TWO con's is that you cannot remove the drives without taking the cover off. It makes hot swapping drives difficult. If you do not have networking experience it can be difficult to setup. There are no specific instructions so rely on the synology wiki or forums. Trust me you will not be the first to ask the same questions so the answers are mostly there already.

I have it setup with 4 western digital 750GB drives in a Raid 5 spare configuration.

It is a great product and would by another one again.

Pros:
Core features for a NAS:
- Powerful yet easy to use management interface.
- Solidly reliable even after copying 300-400 GB over a 5-6 hour session.
- Support for different volume types (Raid 0,1,5 is what I care about).

What makes a NAS not a pain to use:
- Easy initial setup and updates.
- Pretty good documentation.
- Lots of other features that I don't use (media server, web server etc).

Bonus:
- It is a proper Linux machine, which is a huge bonus for file management on the device. You can simply telnet into it and do what you like.
- Their website is useful, especially the user contributions wiki. People try all kinds of drives with this. They also have a pretty long list of compatible drives.

Cons:
- Performance is middling. Only does about 21 Mb/s writing to a Raid 0 volume when copying a large amount of data (300GB+). I have it connected to a Gigabit LAN and on other network copy operations, I get close to 60 Mb/s while copying data.
- Couldn't get the iTunes library feature to work, but I haven't really looked into it.
- The only USB drive I tried (my 2nd Gen Drobo) was slow slow slow, but it could be a factor of the drive itself and not the NAS.

Other Thoughts: I set up two RAID 0 volumes, 1.5TB each. Takes between 6-7 hours to create a full RAID 0 array. I have nothing to compare with, so I can't comment on how fast or slow that is.

In the final analysis, it's a solid, feature packed and well priced NAS even though the performance could be better.

Ease of assembly: It was very easy to put together. My only complaint is if something goes wrong, the web interface isn't too helpful. Make SURE your drive(s) are seated, as I did not have a warm, fuzzy feeling that they were seated properly. I AM a disk-drive insider, and built it up with 4 1.5TB drives. When I formatted the volume, the web interface gave me no error indicating something went wrong. It would identify all the drives properly but would simply return to the Volume menu after trying to create the volume. I FINALLY found the logs in some other menu, which indicated there was a problem with Volume format (duh). It would be nice if there web software indicated this during the volume format, rather than having to find the logs in another menu.

Solution: I formatted each drive individually, and was able to establish that there was a problem with drive #2 (a known good drive). I pulled it out, reseated it, and retried. At that point I was able to reformat the volume as a RAID and everything worked correctly.

Its up and running and I love it! I rated the performance as only 4 stars (only for writes), but I think that is due to the fact that is how I feel about the performance, not comparing it to other brands. It may be a case of the performance being bad because that is a fact of life with RAID 5's, where several writes and possibly seeks may need to be done for one write.

I got this product mostly for backup purposes. While I don't recommend their backup software, others do work with it. I use the built in Windows for Image backups and then I use Retrospect for file by file backups.
This does work well to store your music although it doesn't sort the music very well when you look at it on your Windows Media player.

I don't consider the networking portion of this product to be that difficult. You need to reserve the IP selected for it or put in a static one.
I haven't used the photo option yet but plan to.

This is not a five minute project. It takes alot of time to figure out how best to use it and what options to choose. For example the group policy option is more of a constraint on files / folders not permissions, once I figured that out it made alot more sense.

I haven't turned on remote access yet but plan on using at least FTP.

Okay it isn't blazing for speed backing up files, even on a Gig LAN, but I guess I didn't expect it to be as fast as local backups.
I would suggest looking into the iSCSI drive option, especially on Windows 7. It is much faster, although you have to give up part of your total space for that drive option.
All in all, I am pleased with this unit. If I had it to do again, I would probably check to see if one of the other products would be faster for backups but still close to the same price and I would buy all the drives myself and perhaps go with 1.5 or 2 TB instead of the 1 TB drives.

The Seagate 7200.12 seem to work very well. I ended up doing the Raid 5 plus spare. It made the most sense to me.

This thing is slow, I'm a disater recovery specialist for a living and deal with many NAS systems. Granted this is more for a home user, but this system over a Gigabit Network is very slow, I get 35 to 40MBS at best on reads and about 22 to 30MBS on writes.

Hooking an external USB drive to it to copy to and from is even slower. The system has some nice features (overkill if all you need is a NAS system). The small amount of ram is more than likely the resaon for the systems slowness, hard to belive in this day and age they could not make 512k a standard.

I got the 4 terabyte model using raid 5. The system came default with Seagate drives, I picked up a few spares (extact model) from Amazon for around $70 each, figured it might be wise to have stand-bys.

This NAS hasn't given me any problems. I used 4 1TB WD caviar black drives and enabled TLER. The volume setup was long but the amount of features and frequent firmware updates makes this something I hope to enjoy for a long time. Also they're hacker/modder friendly!

this NAS really fit the bill, it was easy to set up out of the box. it has a simple easy to use interface. It's been rock solid and had no issues (unlike the other two NAS's I have: buffalo - bad hardware and smartstor - mediocre software.) I only had one hiccup, that was figuring out that you have to create a volume before you could share the disk.

It's performance was supposed to be one of the best but it seems slower than the smartstor for copying files through my mac. All the copies have to go through a pc, it'd be nice to be able to push files to other NAS's without a PC. I use it for DVD playback and it's plenty fast to keep up with any HD video, so i'm happy about it.

I have had this unit for a couple of yrs now. Solid performer. I have it configured with four drives in a Raid 5. I have a 1GB Ethernet network. This box is slow. You can get faster products from Synology.