So far, everything has worked like a champ. The Media server is seen by the PS3, and although the PS3 sucks bawls when it comes to format compatibility, when it CAN play something, it does seamlessly.
We ran a blue ray movie off the Synology, to see how fast it could throughput. The router isn't fast enough to even begin to test, I'll have to get a switch and some better networking equipment before I can.
So, to compensate, we watched a blue ray movie WHILE uploading a blu ray, and had two sources pulling and 1 uploading.
No chokes or anything. A consistent, router limited 10 MB/s.
So that was great.
However, if you setup this unit for FTP, make sure to follow synology's instructions and use filezilla, otherwise you'll get frustrated with other shitty FTP programs.
I still like it so far. It's fast, efficient, very quiet, it's amazingly silent for what it's doing, though the clicking is inevitable in any system.
The temperatures are about 98 98 100 100 99 Fahrenheit in the unit itself under blue ray playing mode. So that's really decent. Ambient room temp is 70 Fahrenheit.
HOWEVER
I encountered one problem, but not with the synology DS1511+. The problem is, VLC.
VLC does not seem to support UPnP/DLNA browsing/playing! What the hell!
I googled this, and found either they do not have enabled, since it seems there are builds with it, or it is not working for just windows.
I was able to download XBMC (oh god I hate it) and it worked fine with the synology, no problems, minus I absolutely hate that media player. VLC spoils you, really!
For example, when watching the dark knight on blue ray, we randomly skipped about and sped up/slowed down the playback and added filters. Still good, though seeking took a moment, naturally. But no longer than I would have expected.
Windows XP Pro seems to SEE the UPNP server, but I don;t have any programs that can browse / pull data off it.
This is a crippling problem, and I want VLC to stream from the NAS.
In unrelated news,
I made the candied citrus peel recipe from the "Desserts By Pierre Herme" awesome cookbook I have; And, OH MY GOD they are amazing. I don;t know what I did wrong, if anything, but caramel + orange + candied is absolutely something else. It's incredibly tasty, and super addicting. Once they all dry, I'll coat them in some crappy ass commercial dark chocolate like Hershey's special dark or something. Maybe.
I'm definitely making these things more often. And I'll quantify the recipe so I can replicate it.
-Z
2011-02-12
2011-02-09
Synology DS 1511+ - Playing around
So, 10TB of a RAID 6 resulted in 5.44 TB of usable space; and it only took about 7 hours to parity check, maybe 1 to build! If you think about it.
10TB / 8hr => 364 MBps
Which, my poor ass router can't go that fast.
So the thing is fast. I started formatting and toying with settings and stuff, uploading movies and music to test it's integrity.
Pending results from the UPnP test with some PS3's.
Remove the DNS so the box is intranet only, which is awesome.
Here's what it looks like in action, using Synology's DSM web interface:
I'm a little hesitant to enable the transcoding on it, but we'll test it out while it's still fresh.
Great job so far guys, this is the best tech product I've ever used. Props Synology!
-Z
10TB / 8hr => 364 MBps
Which, my poor ass router can't go that fast.
So the thing is fast. I started formatting and toying with settings and stuff, uploading movies and music to test it's integrity.
Pending results from the UPnP test with some PS3's.
Remove the DNS so the box is intranet only, which is awesome.
Here's what it looks like in action, using Synology's DSM web interface:
I'm a little hesitant to enable the transcoding on it, but we'll test it out while it's still fresh.
Great job so far guys, this is the best tech product I've ever used. Props Synology!
-Z
2011-02-07
Synology DS 1511+ - Initial Setup
So, the unit arrived this afternoon.
after a greedy session of package unwrapping, I uncovered the DS1511+ itself.
It looks a lot better than the picture.
Everything is exactly as stated. I had no problems opening the packaging, the instructions were all in a .pdf, easy to follow, the drive sleds were a little flimsy feeling, you have to really be gentle with them.
Basically, you unlock the bay, push in the bay, and it pops out making it easy to slide out. Then, you screw in the hard drive (rubber grommets don't fit for noise abatement, need that fix.) And slide the sled back in, and push the clip back down.
It took me a few tries on the first drive to get it push back enough before it would click back, slightly frustrating, but it only happened the first time and was user error.
With all the drives in place, I carted the unit into the NAS Room, and setup the UPS for the unit.
The UPS is manditory for any kind of storage operation, since if the power fluctuates, you need a battery backup to keep the unit running until it can shut down and suspend proporly.
I plugged it all in, and installed the Disk Manager software.
Now this part is a little hairy, but my systems have auto-everything disabled. So, I manually allows the autorun, and a little splash window popped up, and you click a big install button. Wait a minute, then you detect your NAS.
Initially, nothing. I check the ethernet cable, and I guess it had wiggled out. So be careful with those ethernet cables, make sure you have a good connection physically.
After that, it blinked on, and I logged in.
From there, it got easy. The Linux OS they use is really damn clean. It works through a web browser nicely, I had 0 trouble using it. Was like home.
More interestingly, is that using a OS like that in a web browser (aside from being really stupid imo) was insanely easy to do. Kinda like using a strong VNC/RDP connection.
So, I clicked arround, made some user accounts, setup the RAID6 array, and let it go ahead and check everybody for errors.
So, it should be done tonight.
I'm impressed with this product. Using their software online as a testbed was a good way to test it, and getting the unit in a flawless configuration was a really nice bonus as well.
The next test will be to load it with data, and yank out a drive to see how it rebuilds.
BUT, I probably don't need to do that. It seems perfectly fine to me, I'd rather make sure the UPnP stuff works for the PS3's and the Mac in the house, so I can stream stuff to em.
SUMMARY PROS:
Until next update!
-Z
after a greedy session of package unwrapping, I uncovered the DS1511+ itself.
It looks a lot better than the picture.
Everything is exactly as stated. I had no problems opening the packaging, the instructions were all in a .pdf, easy to follow, the drive sleds were a little flimsy feeling, you have to really be gentle with them.
Basically, you unlock the bay, push in the bay, and it pops out making it easy to slide out. Then, you screw in the hard drive (rubber grommets don't fit for noise abatement, need that fix.) And slide the sled back in, and push the clip back down.
It took me a few tries on the first drive to get it push back enough before it would click back, slightly frustrating, but it only happened the first time and was user error.
With all the drives in place, I carted the unit into the NAS Room, and setup the UPS for the unit.
The UPS is manditory for any kind of storage operation, since if the power fluctuates, you need a battery backup to keep the unit running until it can shut down and suspend proporly.
I plugged it all in, and installed the Disk Manager software.
Now this part is a little hairy, but my systems have auto-everything disabled. So, I manually allows the autorun, and a little splash window popped up, and you click a big install button. Wait a minute, then you detect your NAS.
Initially, nothing. I check the ethernet cable, and I guess it had wiggled out. So be careful with those ethernet cables, make sure you have a good connection physically.
After that, it blinked on, and I logged in.
From there, it got easy. The Linux OS they use is really damn clean. It works through a web browser nicely, I had 0 trouble using it. Was like home.
More interestingly, is that using a OS like that in a web browser (aside from being really stupid imo) was insanely easy to do. Kinda like using a strong VNC/RDP connection.
So, I clicked arround, made some user accounts, setup the RAID6 array, and let it go ahead and check everybody for errors.
So, it should be done tonight.
I'm impressed with this product. Using their software online as a testbed was a good way to test it, and getting the unit in a flawless configuration was a really nice bonus as well.
The next test will be to load it with data, and yank out a drive to see how it rebuilds.
BUT, I probably don't need to do that. It seems perfectly fine to me, I'd rather make sure the UPnP stuff works for the PS3's and the Mac in the house, so I can stream stuff to em.
SUMMARY PROS:
- Easy Setup Physically
- Amazingly easy software setup
- Works so far
- Unusually quiet
- Able to add DX510 units to expand the unit's capacity greatly (26 TB theoretical! 16 TB probably max due to FS problems)
- Drive bays a little flimsy
- No anti-noise grommets for hard drives, nor is there room to add any
- Uses a web interface (However, it has a VGA port and USB ports, I bet you can run it with no web interface. Not yet tested.)
- Filesystem limitations come into play unless you smartly divide the drive out. Which is really hard to do, initially.
Until next update!
-Z
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