Our new home Server Isn’t a Server – The Synology 1813+ NAS review
like many of you, our storage requirements have been growing over the years. Our first Jukebox server was built in 2005, primarily to store music files. Then in 2009 Jukebox MkII was born and with it a reduction in power consumption along with a major leap in performance and capacity to cope with high definition video and a RAW photo archive.
The Old girl Retires
That Windows home Server is still running perfectly today and building it with quality components really paid off. WHS v1 has some quirks, including the annoying practice of rebooting itself automatically when it receives Windows Updates, even if something is running on the machine. However the main reason for retiring the MkII is that it’s stuck with some hardware and software legacy issues implying it can’t use drives above 2TB.
So it seems to be a four-and-a-half-year itch as after the same period has elapsed the time has come once much more to relocation to a new storage service in the Automated Home.
Why a NAS?
We chose a while back our next server wouldn’t be a server, it would be a big hairy NAS. After numerous weeks of research we purchased up a Synology DiskStation 1813+.
Our pimped out Mac small runs 24/7 and has lots of spare overhead despite being our main Plex client feeding the AV system, our Plex Server and Indigo home Automation Controller. So we don’t need another computer running as our server. The Synology sports a dual Core Intel Atom D2700 CPU implying it can take on the role of Plex server with an approved package but our i7 small is unbeatable in that role already, very fast at transcoding videos for streaming or syncing to our mobile devices.
Moving to the 1813+ implies decreasing our running costs again. Synology quote a power consumption of 75.19W during disk access falling to 34.12W during Hibernation. Their tests were carried out with the unit filled with 8 x Western digital 3TB drives (WD30EZRS). Even taking the top figure of 75 Watts, that’s a reduction of over 20% on the old servers 95 Watts which equates to a saving of around £25 per year.
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Preview
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Hardware
The 1813+ is dwarfed beside our old Windows home Server 4U case. The unit is about as small as you’d imagine you could possibly fit a motherboard, backplane, PSU, I/O and space for all those hard drives (157 mm X 340 mm X 233 mm ~5 kgs empty).
The 8 vertical hot swap bays support 3.5″ and 2.5″ SATA II / III disks including SSDs (the DiskStation 1515+ is available with the same hardware but with 5 bays instead of 8 for around £130 less). You can fit solid state drives to act as a cache to speed up the system too. Each bay has a status light above it and a locking mechanism to safeguard your full bays from being unintentionally ejected. The power button is mounted along the top centre with the 4 LAN activity lights to the best of it and the status and Alert lights to the left.
Round the back is the standard IEC power socket (the PSU is built-in so no power brick cluttering the floor). The two fans that take up many of the rear real estate are large enough to allow for a slow speed for less noise (120mm x 120mm). If one fan fails the other speeds up to compensate and they are easily removed for cleaning and replacement. The CPU employs passive cooling (a heat-sink) to help maintain the overall low noise levels too. So far the 1813+ has been quiet (and small) enough to remain in the study, rather than make its way out to a shelf in the rack in Node 0. While we’re on that subject there’s no official rack mount kit for the unit, although you can purchase a customized 19″ rack shelf and front panel for it (details here).
The unit ships with 2GB of RAM and we purchased this Synology 2GB DDR3 RAM upgrade Module and fitted it in the remaining empty slot for the recommended 4GB maximum (we’ve read of users fitting up to 8GB but this seems to result in run away CPU processes and long boot times). note there’s no mention of the 1813+ anywhere on this module but it is the appropriate one – click the picture below for bigger version.
There are 4 x USB 2.0 sockets and 2 x USB 3.0 on the rear of the DiskStation and these can be used to connect a bluetooth dongle for example to stream music or a Wi-Fi dongle to create a hotspot or a 3G/4G dongle for cellular access.
The unit even supports some USB TV Tuner adaptors that can record to the units hard drive and stream the video around your LAN. But the most common use for the USB’s will be to attach drives for file transfer or backups and the system supports external drives using EXT4, EXT3, FAT, NTFS and HFS+ filesystems.
There are 4 x Gigabit Ethernet ports and these can be employed in a variety of ways. The unit supports link aggregation (if your switch is on the supported list and features 802.3ad). With it enabled the 4 LAN ports merge into one super-fast link with a quoted average read speed of 352.39 MB/sec and an average write 211.88 MB/sec (tested in rob 5 configuration with Windows). We’ll certainly be enabling this in the future when we upgrade our switch. For now the speed is around 105MB/sec and we can stream multiple HD videos simultaneously.
Expansion
Finally on the rear are 2 x eSATA ports. On its own the Synology’s 8 bays bring a potential 32TB of unformatted capacity, but those eSATA ports allow some major expansion and can keep your DiskStation growing with your needs for years to come. The ports can be used with regular eSATA drives or with Synology’s own DX513 expansion bays. You can attach 2 of these enclosures, each one holding a even more 5 drives. That’s a potential of 8+5+5=18 drives giving 72TB total with todays 4TB drives, ignoring the inevitability of bigger drives in the future too.
The Synology Wiki has information on 3rd party bays and towers that have been evaluated with the system also. The recommendation for external bays seems to be to create new volumes, rather than expand existing ones as a disconnected eSATA cable television could result in a potentially devastating loss of the entire system.
Setting it all Up
The DiskStation uses the EXT4 filesystem and supports rob 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10, JBOD, and SHR. With rob 5 your data is protected from a single drive failure. It requires 3 or much more disks all the same size, or if you mix drives you’ll get a multiple of the smallest drive only – (number of hard disks – 1) x (smallest hard disk size). RAID 6 has the extra redundancy to allow for 2 drives failing and is calculated as (number of hard disks – 2) x (smallest hard disk size).
SHR (Synology hybrid RAID) is a Drobo-esque alternative that allows you to mix and match drives of different sizes and minimise squandered space whilst retaining the redundant protection of rob and the advantages of a large single volume. You can choose an SHR setup with either single or dual drive failure protection.
You can also have a mixture of rob types across your NAS. For example you might have 3 physical disks merged into a single rob 5 volume with maybe 2 much more disks grouped together to form a second volume in rob 0. You can also have a global ‘hot spare’ drive with some rob setups, in a spare slot ready to take over if a disk fails in any of your volumes.
While you canstart off with a single (unprotected) hard drive and expand from there, there are some things you need to know. only certain rob types are expandable. With SHR, storage can be expanded either by adding much more drives in empty bays, or by replacing drives for bigger ones. With the caveat that a new drive should be as big or bigger than the largest drive in your array. As Synology puts it…
If a volume consists of three hard disks that are 4 TB, 3 TB, and 2 TB respectively, then your new, replacement hard disks ought to be at least 4 TB
When you add a new disk to your range it may take numerous hours for the system to do its thing. During this time the units performance is decreased and it may slow by as much as two thirds its normal speed during some operations.
Unlike with Drobo where bare drives are slotted straight into the NAS, Synology requires that drives be put into its (plastic) trays first. However it is a tool-less operation using little snap in rails that insert pins where the screws typically go. The trays also imply you can use 2.5″ drives / SSDs (with supplied screws) in the Synology, unlike our Drobo FS. Between the two many popular choices, RAID5 and SHR, it typically it seems rob 5 will give slightly better performance. However the extra capacity of the mixed drive setup in SHR implied we chose it for our system merging all 8 drives into a single volume.
Luckily all the drives we had in the WHS box were on the Drive Compatibility list for the Synology. We chose 6 of the largest ones and added a couple of new WD 4TB RED drives. Designed specifically for use in a NAS, the RED’s aren’t much much more that the greens we used in the WHS box and have the added advantage of even lower power consumption and a 3 year warranty rather than 2. We’ve read that much more than 5 Western digital RED NAS drives in a single enclosure is a bad idea, something to finish with vibration sensors? however plenty of vendors offer the 1813+ pre-populated with 8 of the drives. For now ours is configured with the following mix…
Have a play with the Synology rob calculator here
We started to copy the data off the WHS box about a week before the NAS arrived. This took several days and employed every spare bare drive we could stick in our USB 3.0 Dock plus all the external USB drives and local disks around our home network.
We removed our old APC CS 350 UPS from the WHS box (the best £60 we ever spent and part of the reason the WHS box has run trouble-free for so numerous years because our home server died).
Once connected between the mains and the Synology NAS we plugged the interface cable television into one of the USB 2 ports on the NAS. It was picked up instantly by the system, the model recognised and showed an estimated 36 minutes of runtime. It will shut the NAS down automatically before the battery runs out.
Software
Whilst we’ve moved from a ‘proper computer’ to a NAS, this is far from a dumb box. One of the things that sets the Synology aside from the competition is its Disk station Manager. DSM is a desktop-like user interface to the system that runs in a browser window and offers a class-leading user experience. Windows, Mac and Linux users will all be familiar with the UI which makes managing the NAS a trivial task.
Another great plus point is its Synology’s apps store called ‘Package Center‘, which includes one click installs of numerous helpful add-ons like an Anti-Virus Scanner, Plex , Mail, Print, DHCP, DNS, VPN and iTunes / Audio / video / Media Servers too. You can access your DiskStation remotely, even if you have a dynamic IP (IPv6 supported), without any port forwarding using Synology’s ‘QuickConnect’ service. The system offers you with a distinct reference number and you can customise your ID to something like “BobsNAS” to make it simpler to remember.
The ‘Cloud Station’ package is another helpful add-on that creates your own DropBox-like private cloud for syncing files and folders to your computers and devices.