Synology DS1511+ first look (mini review) - Page 6

Anything is possible. They've only ever advertised support for the 3TB disks and a maximum size of the entire array of 45TB.

It seems a bit much to think that they can pre-emptively build the software to account for disk sizes which do not currently exist, even in their labs.

There is no reason to do the full error check routine, etc, if you've already done it once and the disks have not changed. When you choose that option the Synology is writing to every block on the disc so that bad sectors get re-mapped in advance of regular usage on the volume.

If you've done it once there's no need to do it again, I just blew the volume away and re-created it the quick way and it took about 10 minutes.

Just to provide even more detail, every hard drive ever made has bad sectors (even brand new ones) and has a group of 'spare' sectors to re-map bad sectors to.

All the 'full disc check' option does during volume creation is map out all of these bad sectors in advance so that you won't see performance issues down the road if you had a bunch of bad sectors on multiple drives (still should not cause a problem just could cause some performance hits).

Not doing this the first time around is a poor idea since it's also possible you have a marginal hard drive and that's not something you want to discover after putting a volume into operation.

If you've already done this it's done for good, when you add a new drive it always does a full sector check on it too so that should not be a concern either (adding a disk to expand the volume vertically takes a REALLY long time too).

Fair enough but most of us found the box expensive enough without spending $3000 on drives!

Out of curiosity do you run yours on a power conditioner or good quality UPS? In my experience hard drives that fail in a very short of time are often subjected to power brownouts, etc, but obviously a certain percentage will fail for any random reason.

No, blu-ray does not take more than 8-9MB/s. Blu-ray takes about 40-50Mb/s which equates to about 5-5.5 MB/s.

Why don't you try transferring some data from the internal drive of the Windows 7 box as a comparison.

USB2 should be capable of transferring data at speeds up to 30MB/s. However, the fact that you are seeing slow transfers doesn't prove that there is a problem in your Synology box.

You could have a bad data port on your data switch, or a bad cable. You could have a speed/duplex mis-match causing collisions which will choke the speed down substantially.

A friend of mine bought a DS1511+ about two weeks ago and called me up swearing about what a piece of crap it was. Some investigation proved out that he had a duplicate IP address on his network (he had statically assigned an IP to the Synology that was already being used by something else on the network, duh).

So, there would be a lot more testing for you to do before you know what the cause of the slow transfer is.

But, first off I would try transferring from a few other machines on the network. Even a slow laptop hard drive should be capable of doing transfers to the Synology box over SMB at speeds of 30+ MB/s.

Good point, that should work too.