Synology DS1511+ first look (mini review) - Page 15

In any case, changing the redundancy level is unfortunately not something that can be done while preserving the volume. Personally I think that SHR-1 is fine if you are also making backups. It will prevent you from data loss and downtime if a single drive failure happens which is, by far, the most common/likely occurrence. If backups are not being done very frequently, or the volume is split across multiple physical enclosures, then perhaps SHR2 offers more emotional safety!

You build it as a separate volume with whatever redundancy you like. For me, I actually just go with a JBOD (no redundancy). The chances of my primary data set getting corrupted and also having the offsite disks (I make backups and then remove them from the DX510) are extremely low.

Not sure exactly what you mean. There is a backup option you can turn off that says "preserve destination files" you might have a look at that.

I don't think that the Synology backup utility will do what you are describing, but you might be able to simply use rsync to do that and set it up as a job that runs however often you like.

However, I would think it might be safer to do your backups to the DX510 volume periodically like once every week or two and take the volume offsite. When you do that backup you can just set the backup job so that the files on the destination volume are not preserved and it won't keep backups of files you have since deleted.

Synology does not have a way of "ejecting" a volume (at least via the GUI), so what I normally do is shut down the Disk Station, then remove the drives/volume from the DX510 and then power back up. 90% of the time I don't even turn my DX510 on because my backup volume is not in it.

Order of disks may or may not matter depending on the type of volume, but in general I don't believe that it cares.

I don't know that this thread is the place for a large recommendation list of routers/switches... you might want to start a new thread. The Synology is just a device that needs a gigabit ethernet connection, the type of router/switch shouldn't be of particular concern as long as it supports gigabit ethernet.

You should create a thread describing your setup (all components) and what is not working and what the desired behavior is. There are plenty of people who can help you, I just don't want a very useful thread for Synology discussion taken off of the rails with a side topic.

Is anyone else seeing buffering problems after update to the latest DSM 4.1? My XBMC Win 7 started exhibiting problems buffering higher bitrate content after I updated to DSM 4.1, nothing else changed.

I increased XBMCs buffer size to 500MB and the problems seemed to disappear but it's disconcerting nonetheless. I am tempted to reload the XBMC machine but curious if anyone else had seen this behavior.

I don't know what sync tool people are using with Synology, but I have looked at a few that are supposed to support it. I am more than likely going to replace the WHS at my wife's office in the next year and will probably replace it with a Synology since I have had great success with the DS1511+ I have in the basement. I will however have to find a good backup client that will make full restores possible for the 8 or so XP and Win 7 computers at her practice.

There are quite a few decent backup solutions out there for Windows clients, the problem is that they typically cost $40-$50 per client, which if backing up 10 or so machines gets pretty expensive.

Another little thread update. I've been following the CES news to see if Synology was going to bring out the successor to the DS1812 (DS1813?) but from what I can tell that box won't be available for a little while yet.

I ended up running down to 1TB of space on my DS1511+ with 5X2TB drives so I went ahead and added two of the new Western Red (made for NAS) 3TB drives into my DX510 and it bumped the useable space all the way up to 11.5TB. Then, a week or so later one of my original Seagate 2TB drives started spitting out SMART errors so I went ahead and replaced that with another Red drive. Power consumption on the DX510 is really low... like 10-12 watts by itself. The whole stack right now with 7 bays populated and three red and four green drives is about 30-40 watts which is quite impressive. 1KW UPS should be able to hold the whole thing up for over 15 minutes during a brownout.

I've also found this handy storage calculator that might help others... you simply plop in number of disks and sizes you want and it will show you how much useable space you get using SHR vs traditional RAID as well as what products can handle that # of discs.

http://www.synology.com/support/RAID_calculator.php

Down the line I will probably still migrate all seven disks to some kind of eight bay enclosure from Synology, but at this point I think I'm going to hold out to see if they release one this time next year with redundant power supplies.

There is no switch on the DX510, it will power up automatically when you power up the diskstation. It is completely slaved/controlled from the DS1511+. If you press the power button on the DX510 you can turn it off, but the DS will see that it is gone and turn it on again after a few minutes. Back when I only used the DX510 for making offsite backups I would actually pull the power cord from it so that it was completely offline from the DS. They are designed to work together.

Since my volume spans both the DX510 and DS, the DS would never put the DX to sleep... so I can't comment on that. Since I use surveillance station now for my CCTV recording the DS never completely hibernates, so can't comment on that.... what I can say is that the system is very power efficient considering the number of disks in use. For comparison purposes, when I was using my EX495 with four disks plus a five bay external enclosure, I had about 6TB of useable space and it was using close to 100 watts. The DS+DX510 with more storage space is using less than 50% of that.

From a post on Facebook a month or so ago, Synology had indicated they expected DS1513+ and DS1813+ to drop sometime in January, so it might only be a matter of a few weeks now. They might have simply opted not to show the new models at CES as they are likely similar to the predecessors and they don't want to kill sales of final inventory, which isn't exactly being sold at a discount.

I don't expect anything revolutionary, likely just lower power consumption and faster processors. I think I can hold out with my DS1511+ for another year to see if they have a more substantial upgrade up their sleeve for 2014.