Synology DS1511+ first look (mini review) - Page 7

The DX510 is expensive, but it probably has a better quality power supply than the budget enclosures that are out there. The DS1511+ might also be able to monitor things such as the psu and fans of the DX510 and not do that with a 3rd party enclosure, but I'm not sure of that.

I paid about $450 for my DX510 shipped. A 5 bay budget enclosure probably would have been about $175 but I was not sure if it would work and I would rather pay extra to have the peace of mind if I ever span a RAID-5 volume between enclosures that everything would work.

Just another little note about the Synology that might interest Mac users.

I had been nervous about setting up Time Machine on the Synology. Reason being was that with my HP EX495 (which I have been using to run Time Machine), if my gigabit wired iMac did a TM backup of a large file it could actually cause playback performance problems for files from the same server being streamed to my media players.

After a weekend of fun in which I discovered that the HP TM recovery process is seriously flawed (my wife's MBP hard disk took a dump and I had to recover everything) I decided to set up TM on the Synology.

This thing is a tank. Not only was I able to create special TM user accounts for both of my Macs that control the size of the TM backup, but with the Synology solution there is not a single large file created initially that equals the backup size. If you specify 250GB for a TM user, but they only initially have 50GB of data to backup, then the initial sparsebundle size on the Syno box will only be 50GB.

Now, on to the media player relevant part;

With TM backups running from both boxes, I was still able to stream a perfect high bitrate BD MKV file to my Boxee Box in my main viewing area with no hiccups, dropouts or even a hint of a problem.

Synology seriously rocks! .... and I get to scratch another thing off of my list of things that I still use the HP for (now it's down to IP camera surveillance and DC++).

For Time Machine with the Macs, make sure that you create user accounts specifically for Time Machine and set a user quota for that user. Otherwise Time Machine could eventually use all of the disk space on the volume.

When you browse the Time Machine disk from the Mac, just log in with that special user account with the quota, and Synology will take care of the rest.

Just another update on the Synology experience.

I received an alert today that one of my drives in the 1511+ had crashed. The alert feature was pretty good as I got the alert less than 30 seconds via my cell phone and received several alerts, the first one indicated that the volume was degraded and subsequent messages indicated that disk 1 was the culprit. I went down into the basement and the 1511+ was beeping at me and had an amber light on the front to indicate a disk had gone down.

I replaced the drive but grew impatient with the 1511 picking it up, so I rebooted and the new disk was there. I chose the repair option for the volume specifying to use disk 1 for the repair and it passed the parity check and after a few hours is about 40% through parity rebuild.

One nice feature would be to have the Synology automatically start the rebuild if a new disk is inserted in the same location as a drive that has been marked as a failed drive.

I am running tools on the 2TB Seagate drive that was marked as bad, I believe it was one from my WHS so perhaps 12-18 month old unit and probably still under warranty.

It will be interesting if SeaTools says the disk is good but Synology thought it was dead.

Hi Jon.

The SMTP stuff refers to how your settings need to be in order to send email. For example, my internet provider is comcast, and they require SMTP authentication in order to send mail to their SMTP server (mail.comcast.net) so I have to set it up accordingly.

The easiest way to figure out the settings is to check how they are programmed on a computer or smartphone that you have working with sending email.

I set up my 1st alert email address to be the same account that was sending the messages (you can send email to yourself, it's true! ) and I set the 2nd one up to email the email account that is associated with the SMS messages on my cell phone... the messages show up as SMS which means I get a tone, message alert, etc, when they arrive.

I hope this helps.

Yes, the failed drive is an ST3200. It is still running diagnostics, which normally would not take this long (normally a long test of a 2TB drive might take 4-5 hours, this one has been going for almost six and is only about 50% done).

SMART is a terrible predictor of drive failure, at least according to the huge study that Google did a few years ago.

The system is on a dedicated UPS and is in a cool basement that is normally about 60-65F.

Thanks I might take a look at it. I had a spare disk so getting data off the disk is not my concern.

My concern at the moment is that the DS1511+ failed the disk, but SeaTools did a full test and says the disk is "good" which means that Seagate will not issue an RMA.

Okay, that's good to know. I am still puzzled at how SeaTools is passing the disk when the log on the Synology definitely indicates that the disk was thrashing. There were hundreds of read and write errors to that drive right before the disk was marked bad. I suppose it is possible that the slot has an intermittent issue but so far the new disc is working fine and the previous one got 4 months of service before the issue happened.

In my case the SMART was not considered "tripped". Synology was simply taking a pile of read and write errors on that drive and finally decided it was bad.

It is strange for sure. In any event, I will try to get an RMA for the drive, it is possible that the drive has some strange problem that is intermittent.

power usage is definitely related to number of drives, and whether the drives are green or not.

I'm not going to take my DS1511+ down completely in order to put my meter between it and the outlet again, so I can't perform this test you are after unfortunately.

I will tell you that if there is no data access on the volume for a period of about 20 minutes (by default) then the Synology will attempt to manage power consumption by spinning down the drives. Some green drives already do this via their own firmware.

If the device is programmed to shut off and on at specific times of day then the power when "off" should be negligible, as in < 1 watt.

I'm glad you brought this up. I talked to a friend who is a storage engineer and he was adamant that if SeaTools passed the disk, it is highly unlikely that there is anything actually wrong with it.

His suspicion is that when I updated the FW on all of my ST3200 drives a month or so ago that one of them was not completely seated and it simply vibrated out a bit and resulted in all the read/write errors.

He said that the best thing I could have done, rather than replacing the drive, was simply to re-insert it after the scan passed and then re-build right back onto the top of it, which would have probably succeeded and proven there was nothing wrong with it.

I have just hung onto the drive for now and will eventually add it to the array as a new disk when I run out of capacity and go to my DX510 for more space with more drives. Then I will know if there's anything really wrong with it or not.

Definitely interested in what you find out.