Synology DS1511+ first look (mini review) - Page 5

One more little update to the story here as I have just recently made a backup of my primary shares onto a 2X3TB RAID-0 set and wanted to share a few observations.

Any time you add or remove a volume (not disk) from the Synology it is recommended to shut the device down. Alternatively you could probably SSH into the box and unmount the volume from the command line. There is no GUI mechanism for "ejecting" or unmounting a volume safely.

The good news though is that if you add a volume, do a backup of your shares, then shut the box down and take the discs for that backup volume away and then reboot, the Synology won't pitch a fit that the volume is "gone". This is a good thing.

Another little takeaway.... I did a full back up of about 5TB of data onto the new RAID-0 two disk setup for a couple of reasons. First it is a very good idea not to consider your Synology setup your "backup" solution. It could still fail, be stolen, etc. So an offsite backup makes sense. The two 3TB disks making up this volume will go into a safe deposit box.

Secondly, I discovered that if a volume with 5X2TB drives was built under DSM 3.0 then the largest that volume could ever be grown to would be about 18TB. Since there is the potential that at some distant time down the road I will need more than 18TB of space I elected to back up all of my shares, then re-create the volume under the recently released DSM 3.1 and then restore all of my data. This all went very smoothly with the only hiccup being that Mac DS Store created files that have a ._ prefix will not be backed up (and will cause the backup to stall out and fail) so I had to use Blue Harvest tool on one of my Macs to clean the network shares of those files and then backup and restore went without a hitch. The good news is this problem is supposedly fixed in DSM 3.1 so hopefully I won't run into it again.

Upgrade of the box from 3.0 to 3.1 was also very easy, you just point it at your new version file, it will transfer data for a few minutes (be patient) and then you get a screen indicating the box is rebooting. After reboot (3 mins) it is up and running on the new code.

Was extremely painless and no hiccups I have seen so far.

I'm willing to take my chances considering that it is a backup of a RAID-5 type set that can already survive a disk going down.

Chances that both my RAID-5 primary volume and RAID-0 backup both have unrecoverable problems at the same time is EXTREMELY remote.

RAID-1 isn't really optional on a 2 bay unit, it is a MUST unless you also plan on having an offsite backup of your data that you will rotate on a regular basis.

ReadyNAS Duo is a good unit, but it's way way slower than the 211+. A comparable Synology NAS would be an older discontinued model in the 200 series.

I completely understand the risks. I have been working with data for about 15 years now so I am pretty comfortable with what I am dealing with.

For me, personally, backing up in the manner you suggest is more hassle than it is worth, especially when it is time to make a periodic incremental backup, something you can't easily do when you are separating out your content (movies A-J on disc 1, K-Z on disc 2, etc).

What happens when amass 15-20 TB of data, you're really going to try to filter it down so you put parts of each share on their own individual hard drive? Yick.

Clem,

We can certainly agree to disagree and keep it civil, I understand your rationale. My rationale is that the chance of a RAID-0 two disc volume failing is exactly double that of a single drive.

So, if the percentage chance of a hard drive that sits in a box not getting any use 99% of the time is 1% over a 3 year period of time the percentage chance of failure of a RAID-0 volume that is kept in the same conditions (not getting much use) is EXACTLY 2% assuming similar MTBF rates for both drives, etc.

Why on earth would you want to deal with ISCSI? All it does is make the disc look like locally attached storage.

SMB shares is what 99% of users would want. Unless that is you have some super duper server that you want to treat the raw storage on the system as direct storage.

True dat!

From his post I do not get the idea his a business user.

I would recommend starting your own thread with some of the questions, etc, that you have as we have detoured quite a ways off of the purpose of this thread.

Yes, Synology supports JBOD for multiple drives of a variety of sizes that are bundled together into a single virtual disc.

I was not aware that contents of such a volume was more recoverable than a RAID-0 volume if one of the drives failed.

I am with you that it would be nice if Synology created a backup utility that could back up as much data as desired onto multiple serialized drives, and then go back to that same backup "set" for subsequent incremental backup changes, etc.

However, I imagine it would take at least a little bit of development and there does not seem to be much demand for it currently.

DS1511+ is a bit more than that, at least from everywhere I have checked.

okay, thanks for the information, I will consider changing the volume to JBOD and doing a fresh backup before the next time the disks go under lock and key (and 300 tons of steel and concrete).

Just to clarify a bit more, the issue is with vertical expansion and use of 3TB drives. So if you have 2TB drives and want to swap them for 3TB drives you would be capped at 18TB with a volume built under DSM 3.0.

With the same volume built under DSM 3.1 there is no limitation and it will go to 45TB.

I had to deal with this myself, as I have no real immediate plans to do something like this (only have 5X2TB right now) but it's always a possibility down the road. I backed my data up onto a 2nd volume on the DX510 (and also ran into a minor bug with OS X breadcrumbs halting the backup job, also fixed in 3.1) and then upgraded to 3.1 and re-created the volume.

From what I understand, if someone did create an initial volume of 3TB drives (as a few people in this thread apparently did) it should work fine, the problem is just with vertical expansion to 3TB disks if you did not start with them.