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:

• 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)

 SUMMARY CONS:

• 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.

SATISFACTION: Yes

Until next update!

-Z