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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SirGCal - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
Ohh, and you could do it with ZFS, I just like RAID and am more familiar with it over ZFSSirGCal - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
Or you're talking ZFS compression over RAID? I was thinking about something completely different... haven't slept in 36 hours... Twins teething... fun... sorry. But that should work fine on any of these RAID cards.Peroxyde - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
@SirGCal Thank you for all the info you gave. Coincidentally, I have decided to go with the Fractal Define R4 for silence, exactly as you stated. Regarding ZFS, I think this article might be of your interest, in particular the section "What ZFS Gives You that Controllers Can't"http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2010/01/home-server...
SirGCal - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
I have two of those cases myself. Three in the office. It's so quiet. Love it. Mine has windows too. Still very silent and cool with 8 drives running 24'7 (add more fans).As for the RAID-Z, they only compare it in that article to RAID5. while I agree in that case sure it's better. Much is. They don't compare it to RAID 6 where I think it's performance and failover won't keep up. But this particular method I'm not familiar with so I'd have to play with it to know for sure to run comparisons. I am not a RAID 5 fan at all since arrays have grown beyond the 4 TB range overall size to be honest. In those cases, this would likely be my choice.
JDG1980 - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
The appropriate comparison would be RAID-Z vs RAID-5, and RAID-Z2 vs RAID-6. In each case, ZFS wins if you're dedicating the same amount of space to parity data.SirGCal - Sunday, June 16, 2013 - link
I'll check out RAID-Z2. My only immediate pause would be moving it to another RAID card from a card failure... That is something worth considering if you run a large array. But other then that. When I get ready to build this next array, if possible I will run some tests.danbi - Monday, June 17, 2013 - link
You could also look at raidz3 which is triple parity.ZFS works file for small number of disks, but it really shines with larger numbers. Avoid "RAID controllers" as much as possible -- "simple" HBA is way better choice -- performance wise.
Hakker9nl - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
god glad I made a ZFS server. This thing is expensive, slow and more power hungry than my system.For reference I built mine for a third of the prices. Reach internally 300 MB+ speeds externally limited to the 1 Gbit port and uses 60 watt when resilvering.
SirGCal - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
EXACTLY my point above. Thanks for help me illustrate it. I tend to be long winded trying to explain things completely...t-rexky - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
A word of caution for Mac users. I researched a NAS "to death" before purchasing the DS1512+ about six months ago. I have a large number of computer systems including vintage Unix based machines, OS X, Linux and Windows. SAMBA and NFS appear to work reasonably well with the Synology DSM, but there is a fundamental issue with AFP support that remains uncorrected in the latest DSM 4.2 build - the support for Unix style file permissions is broken and DSM overrides the OS X permissions with default values.Synology did improve the behaviour in DSM 4.2 and at least the execute bit can now be correctly set on the remote mounts, but the read and write permissions still do not work. I was extremely disappointed to find such a fundamental issue with a system that is advertised as fully OS X compatible and also widely recommended for Mac users.
For anyone interested in more details, here is the full story: http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=64&a...