Synology DS214play: Intel Evansport Almost Done Right
by Ganesh T S on May 20, 2014 3:00 PM ESTMiscellaneous Aspects & Concluding Remarks
The DS214play is a 2-bay NAS, and most users are going to use it in a RAID-1 configuration for optimal balance of redundancy and capacity. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in RAID-1. 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 DS214play RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power Consumption |
| Idle | 12.01 W | |
| 4TB Single Disk Initialization | 1h 43m 22s | 23.38 W |
| 4TB RAID-0 to 4TB RAID-1 (Expand from 1 to 2 Disks) | 10h 16m 17s | 32.52 W |
| 4TB RAID-1 Rebuild (Replace 1 of 2 Disks) | 10h 31m 15s | 32.36 W |
Coming to the business end of the review, the performance of the DS214play is more than acceptable given the target market (home consumers / power users) and the single GbE link. DSM 5.0's multimedia capabilities are excellent on paper and in practice too, for the most part. Make no mistake, Synology has boldly ventured into a space (hardware accelerated video transcoding for media serving) which no other serious NAS vendor has done before.
In our opinion, from a NAS perspective, the DS214play's unique feature makes more sense than trying to run XBMC on a unit for hooking up to the TV. A NAS needs to be a NAS first and, in most situations, doesn't need to be tied down to a single display. Synology wins hands down on how to properly architect a solution based on an Evansport SoC.
Unfortunately, with bleeding edge features, we also have plenty of bugs resulting in an inconsistent experience. From our interaction with Synology, it looks like they are showing a commitment to devote resources to perfect the firmware for this SoC platform (and also probably release new units based on it such as the 4-bay DS414play exhibited at the 2014 CeBit). So, it looks like most of our concerns should be addressed in future firmware upgrades and updates to the mobile apps.
While the same SoC can stand in good stead for the next generation unit and/or the DS414play, we also need continued commitment from Intel to release SoCs for this product line. Ideally, Intel could offer QuickSync (for which plenty of software work has already been done in the PC space) instead of a custom transcoding block in the SoC. Marrying QuickSync into this lineup would also enable Synology to port the hardware accelerated transcoding capabilities to high-end NAS units based on the Core i-series processors.
On the pure storage side of things, it is not clear why Synology doesn't take advantage of the security engine to provide better performance for encrypted folders. Additional DRAM capacity might prove helpful if the NAS has multiple simultaneous external connections (each triggers a openvpn process) and multiple simultaneous transcoding sessions. In our limited testing, we didn't run into capacity crunch, but it is not inconceivable given that at least one other Evansport NAS vendor has models equipped with 2 GB of memory.
If one is planning on buying the unit solely for its transcoding and media serving capabilities, restrictions such as the non-availability of DTS audio (probably permanent) must be fully understood. If it is mostly user-generated media (such as camcorder streams or PVR recordings) and not Blu-ray remuxes, the DS214play presents an excellent (and currently, the only) choice at its price point / power consumption profile. For those worried about two bays not being enough for media storage, the DS214play also supports the DX513 expansion module (that attaches to the eSATA port) giving a total of seven disks across at least two volumes (the disks in the DX513 can't be used to expand the existing volume using the two primary drives).
The DS214play is priced at $370 for a diskless configuration. Synology's premium pricing is a well-known fact, but the unique multimedia features of the DS214play make it difficult to actually find a competing unit to compare the price against. All said, the strengths of DSM 5.0 and the well-developed mobile ecosystem combine to create an enjoyable and unique experience for DS214play users once the transcoding limitations are understood.
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toonvl - Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - link
For me it's hardware RAID and RAID expansion options. FreeNAS OS can help you build a custom NAS yourself, but cannot provide RAID expansion sadly enough.That's if you want RAID 5, 6 and the likes and have the option to add/exchange disks with different capacity etc.. But if you just want RAID 1 and stick to it, then you're probably better off with a micro-ATX rig and software RAID like you suggest.ZeDestructor - Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - link
All in all, I have been completely sold on ZFS, and have no plans to use anything else for a NAS or any other form of critical storage until btrfs (a GPL-compliant and even more powerful successor to ZFS) gets a stable release. Oh, and personally I wouldn't run FreeNAS: I'd run bare FreeBSD and set it up manually.PS: A nice article from arstechnica on ZFS (and CoW FS in general): http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014...
ZeDestructor - Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - link
Gah... most of my comment about ZFS got nuked.... And I can't be bothered to retype in all out, so here's the tl;dr edition (read the arstechnica article I linked for more detailed info):Compared to HW RAID controllers:
- RAID5/6: ZFS has RAIDZ1/2/3, for 1, 2 or 3 disks worth of redundancy, equivalent to RAID5/6/there is no equivalent to RAIDZ3 to my knowledge
- Add/exchange disks with different capacity: Done in ZFS by swapping each disk in a vdev (ZFS term more or less equivalent to arrays), then "resilvering" once all is done to increase it's size.
Features no HW RAID controller has (to my knowledge):
- Copy-on-Write (CoW): each update to a file is written as the difference to the original file. This allows for self-healing (damaged blocks are recovered using checksums and old data to regenerate current data) and snapshots (snapshots of the FS is a a state a a point in time). Snapshots make incremental backups trivial. In fact, quite a lot of people use snapshots to back up production databases instead of doing a traditional dump the DB to disk method.
All in all, I have been completely sold on ZFS, and have no plans to use anything else for a NAS or any other form of critical storage until btrfs (a GPL-compliant and even more powerful successor to ZFS) gets a stable release. Oh, and personally I wouldn't run FreeNAS: I'd run bare FreeBSD and set it up manually.
PS: A nice article from arstechnica on ZFS (and CoW FS in general): http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014...
toonvl - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link
thanks! I'll check this out. When I have a need for a next expansion I'm probably going to use this :)JeffS - Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - link
I've been using 2-drive NAS appliances (first Netgear and then Synology) for probably 6 or 7 years now. I've got above-average technical acumen, but with two little kids and a busy job, I don't have enough hours in the day right now to worry about reliable storage. These things are small enough to sit on a bookshelf, they run quietly with low power, and a red light starts flashing and a buzzer sounds when there's a problem. About a year ago, one of the drives in my RAID-1 died. I swapped in a spare and never missed a beat. It would have been divorce court for me if our 20,000 family photos went down the drain. Yes, I still run regular backups (again, one push of a button on the front panel with an external drive plugged in), but it's a huge relief knowing that the odds are low of drive failure taking down our storage system. I never get support calls from home asking why the storage system is offline.Having said all that, I just bought a $250 Dell mini tower server, and I plan to move to it as our storage array. I'll probably keep the Synology and set up automated backup. I'm now trying to find space in the wiring closet for the Dell, and it's not an 'appliance' like these NAS units are.
Basically, the NAS took away all of the thinking with regard to redundant, networked storage, and that allowed me to stop procrastinating and get everything centralized with RAID and backup. I've got a lot of hobbies, but our primary storage array shouldn't be one of them.
We do only need about 2 TB of storage, so we're probably the ideal customer for a unit like this.
bill.rookard - Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - link
Couldn't agree more. I picked up a very nice rackable case a while back, dropped a Gigabyte mATX board in with a dual core Phenom processor, a few GB of ram, and 5 WD drives with FreeNAS. With the exception of one RMA'd drive which failed after about 6 months, it's been absolutely rock solid for about 7 years now. Total cost on the entire build, including drives (5 x 2TB drives) was right around $800 (the drives alone were $600 at the time).While I certainly do appreciate having an easy setup for this type of unit (plug, configure, play), the limitations are just too restrictive (ie: either 4TB with redundancy or 8TB without - which is simply NOT a real choice). Yes, I'm certainly an edge case when it comes to this type of thing, but looking at any 5-bay devices (which would be my personal minimum), you're easily into near four digit costs and that's NOT including a drive.
ganeshts - Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - link
I used to think like you guys till very recently. However, in addition to some of the points mentioned by other readers, there are certain aspects that only these NAS vendors provide:1. Mobile app ecosystem - Creation of a mobile app (iOS / Android) which presents an easy and intuitive interface to your NAS's contents
2. Operation of relay service to access your NAS content from an external network without port forwarding
3. Automatic backup of data from mobile devices to the NAS
4. In the case of DS214play, a hardware accelerated transcode engine behind the media server feature.
For a non-tech savvy consumer, or even for a person who knows the internal details, but doesn't want to spend time configuring or building a NAS, the units supplied by these NAS vendors make a good choice.
ZeDestructor - Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - link
I'll consider buying them when they use Copy-on-Write filesystems, and come in sizes greater than 16bays for under 6k (a fully-built backblaze pod for 45 drives comes in around the 3k mark). I value data integrity more than any convenience, and as of now (to my knowledge), a CoW FS is the best thing you can get.If you are in contact with said companies, it would be nice if you could mention that to them... anyone who has encountered bit rot knows that RAID just isn't enough these days...
jamyryals - Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - link
Couldn't agree with you more Ganesh. I have a home built set up right now on an old tower. I've been running Plex/Cloud-backups for a while now, and the fact these standalone NAS boxes have native integration with little hassle is very attractive. In the future I will be buying a solution like this.Aikouka - Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - link
Does Plex (read: Plex's modified version of FFMPEG) work with Evansport yet? Last I checked a month or so ago, it doesn't, which means you do not get hardware transcoding with this device (or any other Evansport-based NAS).