Questions about Synology DiskStation DS410j

[kifto]

Hi to everyone

im thinking about buying a Diskstation DS410J. There are a few good offers in some spanish e-shops (where Im from, sorry for my irregular English).

My questions are:

1/ The HDDs. Which one of these two differents hard disks do you think that could be a better option for this device?...Im trying to decide between 4 1tb units of these two branches:

option A : seagate barracuda 7200.12 1tb ST31000528AS (32mb / 7200rpm)
option B : western digital caviar green 1tb WD10EARS (64mb / 5400rpm)

I will buy 4 of them, probably of 1tb size each (if I dont find a good offer in 2tb HDDs), and they will work in raid 5 or raid6 (I still have to think about the most apropiate raid config for my needs)


2/ Im a bit newbie using NAS , homeservers and similar devices (Im a linux user since a few years ago, but always in desktop distros. I mostly use my computer for my homework and my hobbies).
For example, ¿can I host a website on internet from this device and use the local storage options at the same time in my home network?
¿Is the GUI interface as easy to use as the product guide says?

3/ which is the storage limit of this device (the 4 SATA2 connections + the 2 USB2.0 connections)
If the SATA2 limit is 8tb, How many usb hard disks can I add and how big can they be? (another 8tb?..only 2tb more?...I would like to have an idea of the number, I dont need the exact exact amount)

4/ My porpouse is to use tis device:

a. First of all as on line storage for my files in my home network. I have different computers with different OSes (different windows versions, different linux distros, mac os X Leopard & snow leopard, and free BSD mostly) Will I have any problem to acces my files (or managing the device) from any of these 4 OSes?
b. Probably I will have it most all the day downloading files, so this is the second most important use I will give to it. (bittorrent,ftp,etc...9
c. if Im going to have it most of the time working, perhaps I will try to host my blog in this diskstation.
Is possible to do these 3 things at the same time? I mean, share files among my different computers and OSe (for example through samba) at the same time Im downloading files from internet using bittorrent protocol while at the same time Im hosting my blog using the web server functions of the device.

At home Ive got a 3mb/s ADSL connection...320kbps download / 32kbps upload (of course I see that the connection would be a problem if my blogsite would have too many visits (i has not) or if at home I was using too many PCs (only 3 or 4 at the same time)

Thanks for your help

[maxxfi]

1/ The HDDs. Which one of these two differents hard disks do you think that could be a better option for this device?...Im trying to decide between 4 1tb units of these two branches:

option A : seagate barracuda 7200.12 1tb ST31000528AS (32mb / 7200rpm)
option B : western digital caviar green 1tb WD10EARS (64mb / 5400rpm)

Sorry, I have no specific hint on this. I will only say that as you are planning it to use mostly as backup and download unit
neither the 64MB cache of the WD nor the 7200 rpm of the Seagate are probably going to affect the performances.

¿can I host a website on internet from this device and use the local storage options at the same time in my home network?

Yes.

¿Is the GUI interface as easy to use as the product guide says?

See for yourself: try the live demo page at http://demo.synology.com (admin password is... the brand name )

a. First of all as on line storage for my files in my home network. I have different computers with different OSes (different windows versions, different linux distros, mac os X Leopard & snow leopard, and free BSD mostly) Will I have any problem to acces my files (or managing the device) from any of these 4 OSes?

You can enable at same time Samba (for Windows access), NFS (for Linux/BSD), and perhaps also Mac File service (for OSX).

Is possible to do these 3 things at the same time? I mean, share files among my different computers and OSe (for example through samba) at the same time Im downloading files from internet using bittorrent protocol while at the same time Im hosting my blog using the web server functions of the device.

Yes you can have all the three functions at same time. Probably in your case the first bottleneck would be your ADSL connection,
not the CPU power in the NAS or the disk I/O.

[aurelieng]

1/ The HDDs.

It's always safer to mix different models of HDD with the same performance, because the probability to fail of two identical disks of the same serie to fail at the same time is higher than if they are different. The list of supported HDD is available @ http://www.synology.com/support/faq_show.php?q_id=130

For example, ¿can I host a website on internet from this device and use the local storage options at the same time in my home network? ¿Is the GUI interface as easy to use as the product guide says?

Yes.
User friendliness is largely subjective, you can give the online demo a try to decide if it's easy or not: http://www.synology.com/enu/products/demo/index.php

3/ which is the storage limit of this device (the 4 SATA2 connections + the 2 USB2.0 connections)
If the SATA2 limit is 8tb, How many usb hard disks can I add and how big can they be? (another 8tb?..only 2tb more?...I would like to have an idea of the number, I dont need the exact exact amount)

There is a 2.5To HDD size limit coming from BIOSes. I guess that all Synology boxes suffer from this limit, but I may be wrong. The solution would be to use EFI instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Disk_support

a. First of all as on line storage for my files in my home network. I have different computers with different OSes (different windows versions, different linux distros, mac os X Leopard & snow leopard, and free BSD mostly) Will I have any problem to acces my files (or managing the device) from any of these 4 OSes?

No, juste configure SMB for Windows, NFS for linux and AFP for mac: http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS410j/spec.php

c. if Im going to have it most of the time working, perhaps I will try to host my blog in this diskstation.
Is possible to do these 3 things at the same time? I mean, share files among my different computers and OSe (for example through samba) at the same time Im downloading files from internet using bittorrent protocol while at the same time Im hosting my blog using the web server functions of the device.

Yes. I'm not sure, however, if its 128Mo on board memory will be sufficient.

Thanks for your help

You're welcome

Aurel.