Pre Purchase Questions about DS 1812+

[jrosado]

SHR is only useful when you have different drive sizes, since it tries to create raid5 volumes that maximize the usage of your disks. With equal drives, i don't see any advantage in SHR.

[maclab]

But is there any disadvantages of using SHR over raid 5?

[jrosado]

I don't think you even get an SHR volume, when all the disks are equal. But i don't know enough about SHR to be sure, or event tell you that there will be any disadvantages on using it.

[wattacetti]

I have 5 new Seagates plugged in, done smart test on them all, got the netgear switch all configured to Link aggregation etc..

Now just need to decide on which raid to use, I have 5 x 2td all same specs, so if I was to go SHR or raid 5 any benefit over the over?

Thinking also Raid 6 but not sure if is overkill? perhaps 2 in raid 6 and 3 in SHR ?

Also should I set them all up as one volume if I choose to use the same raid config for all the disks?

My personal opinion of course and you do what you will because your needs are different, but it's going to be used in a production environment and since you haven't outlined a backup strategy, RAID-6 gives you a little bit more security for the data in exchange of course for 1 drive. The decision is based on how fast you can get yourself back up and running. I had a single drive failure 3.5 years after first bringing up a DS508, and others have reported no failures or frequent failures. Since I elected to replace all the drives on the 508, I decided on RAID-6 (with a cold spare) which will keep the 508 running until it gets replaced in a couple of years.

There is no advantage between RAID-5 and SHR in a scenario with identical drives.

How many volumes you want depends on how you want to access your data. I personally stick with one volume, but I've set up for other who have had two or three.

[maclab]

@wattacetti

Thanks heaps for your help its really helped me


As I have never used a raid setup before, but to my understanding if a drive fails with SHR, I can just pull out the bad one and put in a replacement and all is done?

In my 20 so years of computer usage I have never had a drive fail on me (touching wood ) and I have a nice collection of ides sitting in my cupboard too. So I suppose I cant image 2 drives failing on me at the same time (touching wood ) but as a backup plan I will be having another backup of the important irreplaceable suff, most likely to my brothers Qnap NAS which is in a different State of Australia just in case my premises get burgled or burned down, so basically an off site backup.

And the Reason my I was thinking SHR over raid 5 was that I saw no advantage with Raid 5 as you pointed out, but an advantage with SHR in that if I really needed to for some reason my choice of replacement or add on drives to the system is much more flexible.

So I have another question: Say I have the first 5 drives installed as a single volume each drive been 2TB so 5 x 2TB, can I then add a mix match of Drives i.e. my 2 TB Green Cav + 1 TB WD Black Cav and then a 350 GIG Seagate, making them into a single separate volume to store unimportant bits and pieces?


Any opinions corrections to my thinking on anything I have written greatly appreciated

[wattacetti]

As I have never used a raid setup before, but to my understanding if a drive fails with SHR, I can just pull out the bad one and put in a replacement and all is done?

That's correct, but the new disk has to be the same capacity or better than the failed disk. Repair also isn't automatic, so you get to visit Storage Manager.

In my 20 so years of computer usage I have never had a drive fail on me (touching wood ) and I have a nice collection of ides sitting in my cupboard too.

I have a little closet full of bricks (remember Micropolis?) Anyway, drives fail and your NAS would technically be running 24/7 unless you implement some sort of power management schema.

So I have another question: Say I have the first 5 drives installed as a single volume each drive been 2TB so 5 x 2TB, can I then add a mix match of Drives i.e. my 2 TB Green Cav + 1 TB WD Black Cav and then a 350 GIG Seagate, making them into a single separate volume to store unimportant bits and pieces?

If you are adding to the existing 5-drive volume, the 2 TB Green should be recognized; it's equivalent storage but I'm not exactly sure how tolerant SHR will be when mixing and matching close but dissimilar makes in this scenario. The other two drives cannot be added to this drive set.

If you are *not* adding to the existing 5-drive volume, you can use SHR to set up those three drives into some semblance of a RAID array under a separate volume, though I wouldn't want to be losing either the 1 or 2 TB drives in that scenario.

There's a forum on setup where you should be able to find additional information or at least read other people's experiences.

[thewonderer]

I have read that some people have upgraded the memory from 1 to 3GB of DDR3 RAM. Has anyone any ideas of what memory modules successfully work and what the benefit is to the NAS? Guessing it can handle more applications open at one time.

Looking forward to some reviews of this unit soon.

[pheobe green]

What you can do however, is have an additional NIC in the workstation that is then binded (aggregated) with the other, thus giving you the theoretical 2000Gb/s to the NAS.

As a note, where I work we have 10Gb/s backbone to our NAS and a lot of our database servers have binded gigabit NIC's - some have two NICs others have four. Those servers have theoretical throughput of 2000Gb/s and 4000Gb/s respectively.
[/quote]

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[maclab]

Overall I have found it to be excellant.

Disappointments:

itunes server - big pain in the butt, to slow and hangs a lot. I have gone back having it on my internal drive of my MBA and just using itunes match which is an even bigger pain in the ass but better than constant hangs for now

Link Aggregation - no real gain

[thewonderer]

Thanks MacLab for the general feedback.

Have you found the unit to be quiet with the inbuilt fan... as in, quiet enough to have in a room at home ?

Any other impressions would be appreciated...

Thanks

[537635]

I've been using the DS1812+ two weeks now.

I live in a studio apartment and I have the NAS stacked on a shelf above the door, along with the modem, router and a UPS. Work table is about 4m away and I sleep about 6-7m away.

I must say that it is louder than I anticipated. The 23dB in the specifications seems like it's really quiet, but it is not. But still... with the window open it's barely audible, even at night. For a comparisson... a fridge is much louder. I have 6 hard drives inside, two of them are pretty old and pretty loud. I have the Download station set to switch off at night and disks go to standby 20 minutes later.


Other impressions:

It's a wonderful machine. I've had a couple of external USB hard drives (which I dismantled and trasferred the HDD into NAS). This is way better.

Speed:

Lenovo T400s & Apple Airport Extreme

SMB: 50 / 70 MB/s (upload, download)
eCryptFS: 20 / 30 MB /s
TrueCrypt: 30 / 40 MB/s (I guess the bottleneck here is the slow computer processor)

[sonynair]

But is there any disadvantages of using SHR over raid 5?

This doesn't seem to have been answered...

Is anyone able to confirm if using SHR has any disadvantages over RAID5?

If all disk are the same size, should I use RAID5 or allow Syno to create an SHR?

Many thanks

[maxxfi]

Is anyone able to confirm if using SHR has any disadvantages over RAID5?

If all disk are the same size, should I use RAID5 or allow Syno to create an SHR?

Many thanks

In the conditions where both SHR and RAID 5 are possible (i.e. same size of disks) there is no difference between them, simply because SHR 'logic' creates a plain RAID 5 array, i.e. SHR doesn't add any overhead with disk structures.