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
Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology
The testbed for the Synology DS1812+ involves the SMB / SOHO NAS testbed we built last year. Performance evaluation is done under both single and multiple client scenarios. In all cases, the two network ports are teamed with 802.11ad dynamic link aggregation. Our rackmount NAS reviews use SSDs typically, but, in the desktop form factor (for units based on ARM / PowerPC SoCs or the Atom series, typically), we use hard drives. Even though our review unit came bundled with 1 TB Seagate drives, we chose to go with the Western Digital RE (WD4000FYYZ) drives that have been used in our other NAS reviews. This allows us to keep benchmark figures consistent across different NAS units.
| AnandTech NAS Testbed Configuration | |
| Motherboard | Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual LGA2011 SSI-EEB |
| CPU | 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630L |
| Coolers | 2 x Dynatron R17 |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-12800CL10Q2-64GBZL (8x8GB) CAS 10-10-10-30 |
| OS Drive | OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB |
| Secondary Drive | OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB |
| Tertiary Drive | OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid (1TB HDD + 100GB NAND) |
| Other Drives | 12 x OCZ Technology Vertex 4 64GB (Offline in the Host OS) |
| Network Cards | 6 x Intel ESA I-340 Quad-GbE Port Network Adapter |
| Chassis | SilverStoneTek Raven RV03 |
| PSU | SilverStoneTek Strider Plus Gold Evoluion 850W |
| OS | Windows Server 2008 R2 |
| Network Switch | Netgear ProSafe GSM7352S-200 |
Thank You!
We thank the following companies for helping us out with our NAS testbed:
- Thanks to Intel for the Xeon E5-2630L CPUs and the ESA I-340 quad port network adapters
- Thanks to Asus for the Z9PE-D8 WS dual LGA 2011 workstation motherboard
- Thanks to Dynatron for the R17 coolers
- Thanks to G.Skill for the RipjawsZ 64GB DDR3 DRAM kit
- Thanks to OCZ Technology for the two 128GB Vertex 4 SSDs, twelve 64GB Vertex 4 SSDs and the RevoDrive Hybrid
- Thanks to SilverStone for the Raven RV03 chassis and the 850W Strider Gold Evolution PSU
- Thanks to Netgear for the ProSafe GSM7352S-200 L3 48-port Gigabit Switch with 10 GbE capabilities.
- Thanks to Western Digital for the eight WD RE hard drives (WD4000FYYZ) to use in the NAS under test.
In order to evaluate single client performance, we booted up one VM in our testbed and ran Intel NASPT on the CIFS share in the NAS. iSCSI support evaluation was also done in a similar manner with a 250 GB iSCSI LUN mapped on the VM. For NFS, we ran IOMeter benchmarks in Linux. For evaluation of multiple client performance, we accessed a CIFS share from multiple VMs simultaneously using IOMeter and gathered data on how the performance changed with the number of clients / access pattern. Without further digression, let us move on to the performance numbers.
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cjs150 - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
Happy with raid 5 on a 4 bay NAS but I still watch carefully.The problem is simple. I, like most people, if buying an 8 bay NAS would buy all the disks at the same time so there is a high chance the disks are all from the same manufacture batch. So if one disk in a batch fails there is a higher chance of another failing soon after - I know because it has happened to me.
So for 8 disk NAS Raid 6 is a key feature.
That still gives me a 24TB array. Say 16-18 Gb per lossless blu-ray rip leaves room for 1200 blu rays movies (or 4000 if you are happy with some compression) and about 2000 episodes of TV epsiodes at standard definition (no compression) and maybe 3000 CDs.
That should be enough!
SirGCal - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
My point exactly!JeffFlanagan - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
Don't get all your drives from one source or vendor. Buy an assortment of drives for your array, and you'll be much less likely to have 2 drives fail at once.brennok - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
I guess I am not like most people. I used SHR2 so I could fill it with various disks as I upgraded. I only started with four 1TB Reds.SirGCal - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
But that's never enough, building my 2nd 24TB rig now actually.. :-/ But I refuse to compress my BRs. I do strip out everything but the movies, but I also do NOT pirate them. I buy them and put them on my server. No one gets them either. Being in a wheelchair, it's one of my few hobbies though so I have a LOT of movies...cjs150 - Monday, June 17, 2013 - link
Apart from the wheelchair part I do exactly as SirGCal. Using a standard Blu-ray rip (at high quality rather than original) a 2 hour movie comes in at about 15Gb file. Some are a bit larger (17Gb), some a bit smaller (13.5Gb is the smallest).That chews up a 6TB rig very quickly - particular as 6TB hard disk space is not 6TB because HD manufacturers do not quote HD space in binary but decimal units (the difference is about 7% per TB)..
I look forward to when HD come in 10TB sizes! That would be enough on my 4 bay QNAP 419+ which I consider to be an ideal consumer box - plug it in and it works
Babar Javied - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
Can someone explain to me why this would be better than making your own NAS (with FreeNAS or something similar)? Correct me if I'm wrong but you should be able to put together a nice PC for NAS purposes for under $400 without a RAID card.... $800 (give or take) with a raid card that should be better then this no?Peroxyde - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
Exactly! You'd even be agreeably surprise that ZFS is better than a RAID card. Additionnaly your own build server will have much more RAM. I was about to buy a QNAP 4 bays. But after spending sometimes to read more about NAS4Free, I realize that a "roll you own" NAS server beats the prebuilts on all performance factors: better case, silence, better CPU, RAM, etc. etc. There is a big inconvenience though, you need to learn NAS4Free (or FreeNAS. the commercial implementation).Case in point: my NAS server costs me less than $400 (I have the luxury to wait for quality parts to go one sale): Fractal Design R4, Corsair VX 550, 8GB G-SKill Snipper DDR 1600. Just waiting for a good mobo + AMD low power CPU and I am ready.
brennok - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
Not necessarily better or worse. I was looking to replace my WHS and I didn't feel like doing another build. I wanted something compact, quiet, and efficient since it stays on 24/7. The Synology came highly recommended and I didn't feel like doing test builds to figure out which OS I wanted to use.SirGCal - Friday, June 14, 2013 - link
See my reply above to a few posts. I just put it up a few minutes ago... It IS better.. And quite a bit cheaper. The Synology stuff really is NOT very good for the savvy. In-fact, ESPECIALLY with this many drives, your data is at too much risk... I tried to explain it in detail. Sorry for the rather long windedness of the post but I try to be detailed.