Synology DS1812+ 8-bay SMB / SOHO NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on June 13, 2013 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- Storage
- Synology
- Enterprise
Miscellaneous Factors and Final Words
The Synology DS1812+ is a 8-bay NAS, and there are many applicable disk configurations (JBOD / RAID-0 / RAID-1 / RAID-5 / RAID-6). Most users looking for a balance between performance and redundancy are going to choose RAID-5. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild duration testing as well as power consumption recording with the unit configured in RAID-5 mode. The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| Synology DS1812+ RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power Consumption |
| 4TB Single Disk Initialization in RAID-0 | 10h 23m 40s | 32.59 W |
| 4TB RAID-0 to 4TB RAID-1 (Expand from 1 to 2 Disks) | 9h 26m 7s | 42.83 W |
| 4TB RAID-1 to 8TB RAID-5 (Expand from 2 to 3 Disks) | 34h 32m 9s | 51.85 W |
| 8TB RAID-5 to 12TB RAID-5 (Expand from 3 to 4 Disks) | 27h 18m 58s | 64.15 W |
| 12TB RAID-5 to 16TB RAID-5 (Expand from 4 to 5 Disks) | 29h 41m 29s | 74.12 W |
| 16TB RAID-5 to 20TB RAID-5 (Expand from 5 to 6 Disks) | 32h 39m 26s | 83.88 W |
| 20TB RAID-5 to 24TB RAID-5 (Expand from 6 to 7 Disks) | 35h 51m 29s | 92.79 W |
| 24TB RAID-5 to 28TB RAID-5 (Expand from 7 to 8 Disks) | 38h 42m 13s | 101.93 W |
| 28TB RAID-5 Rebuild (Replace 1 of 8 Disks) | 35h 28m 14s | 102.42 W |
Due to the nature of the CPU, RAID expansion / rebuild takes progressively longer as the number of disks increase. Coming to the business end of the review, the Synology DS1812+ has plenty of positives (applicable to other Synology units that I have evaluated also): It is simply the most reliable NAS that I have encountered. All RAID expansions and rebuilds complete without issues, performance is solid and consistent, and the DSM interface is a joy to use. I haven't even touched upon the breadth of apps available which extend the functionality of the NAS beyond the basic firmware features. The combination of stability, price and expandability (coupled with extensive virtualization support) makes it ideal for many small scale virtualization setups. The number of bays available also makes it possible to create multiple disk groups and run volumes with different RAID levels on the same unit (each disk group can have multiple volumes, but all of them have to be of the same RAID level). The DS1813+ carries forward the DS1812+ with the addition of two more GbE network ports (Synology plans to sell both models in parallel).
Despite our extensive praise for the DS1812+, we feel that Synology has left open some areas for improvement. From the hardware perspective, I would have been happy if they managed to provide a AES-NI enabled platform at the same price point. A USB port or two on the front side of the chassis would have been nice. From the firmware side, it would be good to have support for volume encryption in addition to folder encryption. In addition, it would be interesting to see if provision can be made for dynamically expandable volumes with the ability for a disk to be part of multiple volumes (possibly in different RAID levels). This would make the Synology NAS units even more appealing to the crowd currently using WHS / Windows Storage Spaces.
In closing, Synology manages to hit yet another home run in the 8-bay SMB / SOHO NAS space. They are miles ahead of the competition in almost all respects. Even the few quibbles that we outlined in the previous paragraph are just aspects which might make it even more difficult for competitors to catch up.
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saiyan - Sunday, June 16, 2013 - link
A single hard drive is also a failure waiting to happen, enterprise class or not. When a drive does fail, you don't even get the benefit of 24/7 uptime provided by RAID-5 even when the array is degraded. You don't even have the chance to rebuild your RAID array.Seriously, RAID is NOT a backup.
SirGCal - Monday, June 17, 2013 - link
I don't think anyone here ever claimed it was... If they did, I missed it. It's all about keeping data during a repair. Drives won't last forever and 38 hours is a long time to beat on the array to rebuild. On old drives, odds of a second failure go up drastically.Duckhunt2 - Saturday, February 15, 2014 - link
You building something yourself and someone else buying it aint the best comparison. You have to set up so many things. Time is money. Who has time to do that?SirGCal - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
Sorry, can't edit comments... But ya, performance on this is weak. One of mine, of which empty cost the same, but supports Raid 6, can hold transfers much faster including 400M writes, 600M reads, etc. and that's using 5400 RPM consumer grade drives... 700/900M using performance based hardware or more. Mine is a media share server only needing to serve the house so 4-6 Pure HD sources (all legal, sorry, I do not agree with piracy) at the same time is plenty and this is way more then enough. But this is actually the 'slowest' way I could build it... I went for green since I didn't need any speed in this setup... speed in a real Raid is very easy. Writing is a bit slower, especially in Raid 6 due to the complicated error bit calculations... Reading is butter.santiagoanders - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
You have a 10G network to run media sharing? Overkill much?SirGCal - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
For short distance, Cat-6 works fine. My whole house is wired Cat-6 for < $800 minus the electrician who was also a friend of mine. So complain all ya like... Just cause you wanna sit there and do wi-fi isn't my fault.santiagoanders - Monday, June 17, 2013 - link
And how much did you pay for the 10Gbe adapters and switch?Guspaz - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
Is it just me, or is the price of this thing not listed anywhere in the article? Benchmarks are meaningless without a price to give them context.DigitalFreak - Thursday, June 13, 2013 - link
The 1812+ runs around $999, and the 1813+ is $1099.SirGCal - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
To me, that's just too much. I can build the core box itself, FAR more powerful, albiet a bit larger, BUT capable of far more then just sitting there. Can serve as a Subsonic or Plex server, MEDIA stream, Media extender server to Xbox, etc. Even do it's own data workload (handbrake/etc. while running OSx or Windows or even Linux. Anything I choose.). It doesn't have to be a dummy box. And I have two of these running 24/7 and they use VERY little power while doing file server duties. If I load up the CPU to do other tasks, then they'll obviously load up a bit more but...Anyhow, I can make, right now, say an A6 5400K (3.6G dual-core APU) with 16G 1866 CAS10, a Seasonic 620 modular, Fractal Design insulated (silent) tower to hold 8 fast swapable bays and a boot drive, an A75 USB3 board, AND the Areca ARC-1223, 6G Raid 6 card. (SAS cards break down to control SATA drives for those thinking about that...) all for $944.94 right now. And that comes with one giga-bit NIC already. Add more if ya want, or more whatever... That's the point. Plus these cases are dead silent. I even have the one with windows and you can't hear anything from them. They are a bit more expensive and you could save $50 going with cheaper options though but I was being frivolous. Here's a screenshot of one I just did for a core for a small one at work: http://www.sirgcal.com/images/misc/raid6coreexampl...
* The whole point is; I don't understand these 'boxes'. They use nonstandard raid for one. Synology Raid. Which also means if it fails you can't put it on a regular RAID controller to retrieve your data. At least that's how they used to be. Perhaps not anymore.
* But their price is SO high it doesn't make sense. You can build one yourself, better capabilities all the way around in every way, cheaper. And if you ONLY want raid 5, you can knock about $300 off the price tag. Raid 6 is the bulk of that cost... But honestly IMHO necessary with those sizes, and that many drives in the array...
If you actually have no clue how to build a PC, perhaps... But find your neighborhood nerd to help ya. Still without RAID 6, these just don't serve a purpose. Get two smaller arrays instead. 4-drives or less for raid 5. Can these even do hot-spares? At least that would be something... It would be a live drive waiting to take over in case of a failure. Not quite RAID 6, but sorta kinda a bit more helpful, at least for safety. They didn't mention it.