NAS - D-Link DNS-320 vs Synology Ds212J

Y15HAL

Y15HAL

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Having been in your position not so long ago I feel I should help:)

Ps - I will say at this point, that I own the Synology as a result of many hours googling!

Basically it boils down to performance and customisability (is that even a word?!)
Even the entry level Synology (DS110J) which I have, has a much more powerful CPU and RAM than the D-Link, which in real-world terms makes using the system much faster and more responsive.
If you are using the NAS to simply store movie files and push them to a media player, or TV etc, then the D-Link is probably just as good***

***if using a Media Player, the media player does all the video conversion, so the NAS is basically just pushing the file to it, rather than encoding it into the correct format - which is where the CPU and RAM performance is important.


The Synology is just sooo customisable. It has its own operating system which looks like Windows, you have automated backup plans, schedules, 3 USB ports (for things such as printer sharing, backing up onto a USB Hard Drive and importing at the click of a button off a USB pen drive etc)

Mine is only a single disk enclosure, but I have a 2TB drive inside it, which backs up daily onto a 2TB WD Elements USB drive plugged in the back of it. I have the power schedule set up that it powers down the USB drive after the backup completes, whereas the internal drive is spinning constantly.
I also have the option of doing a network backup aswell, so I could, in theory, backup the full contents of the 2TB drive, or individual folders over the LAN to another Network Device or my PC. For example, I could have another 2TB drive in my PC receiving the network backup, again on a schedule of my design.

On top of that the Synology has a fantastic BitTorrent download manager built in. If you use BitTorrent you'll love it. Set off a download, turn off your PC, go to bed, go out, go to work etc, and the NAS handles the download itself and saves it on its own internal drive (or onto a connected USB drive etc) - so when you get back to your PC and turn it on - the file is downloaded ready for use. You can also get an app to add BitTorrent downloads from your mobile phone, so you're at work.....someone recommends a film thats really good... you launch the app on your phone - find the movie, set it off downloading, then when you get home its finished. I cant tell you how many times I have use this for various things.

There is the remote access.. either over web, so you can access your full drive contents (or a specific folder) from anywhere in the world, via a remote log-in. There are the iPhone and Android apps, for doing the same.
Its an iTunes server which in my house provides 3 PCs and Laptops with around 100GB of music which is shared and accessible by each device at the same time.
It also supplies two western digital TV Live hubs in my lounge and bedroom with HD Movies over LAN.

I dont know the specific specs of the D-Link, but I am 100% happy with my Synology and as I forsee myself using it for many years, the initial outlay cost didnt see so bad if Im still using it in 5 years time, when I would have guessed that I would have upgraded the D-link by then!

HTH
 
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Synology - more because in my experience the name D-link sounding like "de-link" isn't an accident.
 
Synology have the best web interface and very reliable units. Qnap are also very good.
Avoid thecus at all costs. My netgear unit is far more reliable and netgear have far better support!
 
I have a D-Link 320.

It just sits there, doing its job, day in, day out.

Couldn't recommend it highly enough, and at ~£60 it's a steal.
 
Thanks for everyone's input so far.....

So even with RAID1, I still need to have a 3rd copy of data?? :S
 
Y15HAL said:
Thanks for everyone's input so far.....

So even with RAID1, I still need to have a 3rd copy of data?? :S
Click to expand...

Raid 1 is only 1 copy of your data, it just has a disk for disk level of redundancy. So basically it's the same data on the disks, if you delete the file it's gone. If the file corrupts its gone. Etc.

Even with a raid array you need a backup of your data.
 
Raid1 only protects you from a normal drive failure which is the most common problem but the drives are sitting next to each other so you can still suffer from :-
Nas failure (although with specific software you can recover the data.)
Fire
Flood
Robbery
Accidental deletion
 
Raid may not be for me then, bit pointless really. Ive got another 1tb external which I suppose would be good to back upto on a weekly basis as suggested then.

I may just go for a single enclosure in that case then....but then what makes the likes of synology any different to any other standard and drive?
 
Y15HAL said:
I may just go for a single enclosure in that case then....but then what makes the likes of synology any different to any other standard and drive?
Click to expand...

Reliability & worthwhile support in case it does actually go wrong.
 
I would also add that no NAS drive will perform like an internal drive, so don't expect it to. I have one of the higher end 2 bay Synology (DS710+) and whilst its quick at bulk copying/reading etc you can't beat any internal drive for access times (the network quite a it of latency)

Don't get me wrong, you can have all your lightroom RAWs stored on there (with your catalog on local disk), but it won't be as quick as everything being local.

I've now changed my setup so that I have everything local (catalog and raws) and use http://allwaysync.com/ to keep an exact copy of everything over to the NAS.

I wrote an article on NAS drives sometime ago on AVForums if anyone is interested?
http://www.avforums.com/forums/netw...rotection-performance-configuration-more.html
 
I would only store my archive stuff on there.....

I like to work on my stuff locally, and then when i'm done, transfer it over.....
 
Zarch said:
I would also add that no NAS drive will perform like an internal drive, so don't expect it to.
Click to expand...
If I could get faster than a gigabit connection, mine would ;) Local benchmarking (it's an old PC running FreeBSD) shows this: Block write 276M/sec, block reads 384M/sec which is approaching SSD speeds :geek: Just need a 10Gig network connection now :D

Edit: Nice article BTW :)

Carry on... ;)
 
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At work we have recently upgraded the storage for the customer email to a couple of the top of the range qnap 4 drive units fully populated with 240GB OCZ SSD drives. They are really quick but more importantly the access times are a huge improvement which makes a real difference when reading and writing lots of small email files.
 
arad85 said:
If I could get faster than a gigabit connection, mine would ;) Local benchmarking (it's an old PC running FreeBSD) shows this: Block write 276M/sec, block reads 384M/sec which is approaching SSD speeds :geek: Just need a 10Gig network connection now :D

Edit: Nice article BTW :)

Carry on... ;)
Click to expand...

gblades said:
At work we have recently upgraded the storage for the customer email to a couple of the top of the range qnap 4 drive units fully populated with 240GB OCZ SSD drives. They are really quick but more importantly the access times are a huge improvement which makes a real difference when reading and writing lots of small email files.
Click to expand...

Okay, i'll change my statement slightly...... No "standard consumer" NAS drive will perform like an internal drive, so don't expect it. :clap:

Arad, could some sort of network card teaming help?

Gblade.... 4 x 240gb SSD.... are these people made of money? :lol:
 
It's a small ISP and we were finding the drives were reaching their limits when the used space got to about 250gb. When you are paying £1000 for a nas then getting 240gb for about £200 each compared to small fast hard disks it honestly didn't make that much difference to the cost.

£2000 for two nas plus £1600 for drives would have the same capability as four nas with standard hard disks so it was a very easy decision to make.
How long it will take the SSD to wear out is a bit unknown but we will keep an eye on the s.m.a.r.t stats anyway.
 
Zarch said:
Arad, could some sort of network card teaming help?
Click to expand...
My switch and FreeBSD support link aggregation, but I think that only allows you to have multiple streams i.e. you can't get 2Gbit to one app on another computer, but you can have 2x 1Gbit to two computers. I really need to play with the network card onm my Win7 machine - it will only pull off the network at 45Mbytes/sec. It can write to the array at 100+Mbytes/sec, but read speed is (comparatively) dreadful. Perhaps one for tomorrow (I've got a spare PCI-e network card here to try).

Had 3 things writing to the disk the other night - 2 dumps from other HDDs in the server running flat out and I could still manage to write 70Mbytes/sec to the disk across the network!
 
arad85 said:
My switch and FreeBSD support link aggregation, but I think that only allows you to have multiple streams i.e. you can't get 2Gbit to one app on another computer, but you can have 2x 1Gbit to two computers. I really need to play with the network card onm my Win7 machine - it will only pull off the network at 45Mbytes/sec. It can write to the array at 100+Mbytes/sec, but read speed is (comparatively) dreadful. Perhaps one for tomorrow (I've got a spare PCI-e network card here to try).

Had 3 things writing to the disk the other night - 2 dumps from other HDDs in the server running flat out and I could still manage to write 70Mbytes/sec to the disk across the network!
Click to expand...

Without wanting to take the OP thread off-topic, only time i've had that sort of bottleneck was with network cards on the PCI bus. Moving to PCI-e may well help. :thumbs: But can't understand why writes are fine and reads not! :cuckoo:

EDIT: Another thought..... what is the speed of the hard drive you have in your Win 7 machine? The max speed will be bound by the fastest write speed that drive can go at. For a good test to eliminate the drive and prove the network is fine is to create a ramdisk on the Win machine and pull the files to there, then there is no hard disk bottleneck.

The slowest part of the chain drags everything else down. The "Performance" section of my article hopefully explains it. :)
 
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It's the same speed SSD or HDD (1TB Samsung). It's an onboard ethernet card. Never thought about it until I built the fileserver but only sorted the filserver performance out this week (the 2TB drives are advanced format so need to be written in 4k blocks rather than the default 512B blocks they were being written to).

Don't worry.. I know what I'm doing - it's just getting round to it that I find difficult ;)
 
arad85 said:
My switch and FreeBSD support link aggregation, but I think that only allows you to have multiple streams i.e. you can't get 2Gbit to one app on another computer, but you can have 2x 1Gbit to two computers. I really need to play with the network card onm my Win7 machine - it will only pull off the network at 45Mbytes/sec. It can write to the array at 100+Mbytes/sec, but read speed is (comparatively) dreadful. Perhaps one for tomorrow (I've got a spare PCI-e network card here to try).

Had 3 things writing to the disk the other night - 2 dumps from other HDDs in the server running flat out and I could still manage to write 70Mbytes/sec to the disk across the network!
Click to expand...

Had a bit of red wine so in a little fuzzy, but if I remember rightly aggregation and speed depend on the nic and modes are available. I know win server 2008 reports our teamed interfaces as a total speed but those are intel pci-x server cards. I think off top of my head they are set to load aggregation and failover?

Re the read speeds have you set your jumbo frames on or changed the frame size?

I'd like to thank iOS predictive text for the above lol
 
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You did well Neil ;)

Not changed frame size as you need to set all hosts to use the same framesize (according to Wikipedia at least: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo_frame) and I have a number of different things that attach with different OS and NICs.

I know that I can write large packets between machines (I test using iperf) and there is a big jump in performance when writing 32k packets with win7. In fact, I did a test on the laptop, downloading some live CDs and trying the network performance with the different O/Ss. This is what was reported in Mbits/sec on a Gigabit link (size=block size used for transfers, next 3 columns are the laptop running different O/S and the last column is my desktop running the same test):

Code: 
Size  PCBSD-9   Ubuntu 11.11    Win7     Desktop (W7)
			
1K      520        565           165         261
2K      603        920           180         261
4K      627        928           220         283
8K      626        926           200         313
16K     615        920           510         532
32K     615        913           740         909
64K     605        911           915         945
128K    605        912           915         945

As you can see, max throughput varies widely with OS and (presumably) drivers with Ubuntu storming it on the laptops NIC (can't remember offhand what it is...). The desktop (last column) shows a huge "kick" at 16k->32k so I've bought an Intel PCI-e NIC to test it out.

Think it's about time to power the machine down and insert a new NIC ;)
 
Just for completeness, the new NIC didn't make a blind bit of difference....
 
definately frames related, turned jumbo back on (forgot i turned mine off a while ago temporarily) and the speeds now roughly the same down and up.

edit - dont think they have to be the same all round, i mean mine wasnt just now and was working okay
 
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