Synology RackStation RS816 4-Bay NAS

[crmaris]

The RackStation RS816 is a rackmount NAS for small business environments in need of a capable and highly energy efficient file server. It features four drive slots packed into a 19" rack 1U height enclosure. This Synology NAS is powered by an energy efficient Marvell ARM processor.

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[m&m's]

70660s to rebuild a RAID 1! DAMN SON. 19 hours!! That's 17.5 hours slower then the previous slowest but luckily it only took 55s to sync it all while the previous fastest needed over an hour. That's more than 60 times faster (page 16).

What's there secret to sync so fast!111!1!

Also the QNAP TBS-453A felt like he needed special attention on the Power Consumption Comparison Graph with ErP Off (page 15).

The CPU is already maxed with 4 drives and 6 clients while it supports 8 drives with the expansion slot... Makes me wonder how the performance would be like with said 8 drives and ~10 clients.

Overall seems a little pricey for the performance.

Great review

 

[SimpleTECH]

My advise to anyone looking at a NAS, just build it yourself. A LGA 775/771 build would be plentiful for a file/Plex server. Just install NAS4Free or FreeNAS, both which are free. The HDDs will be the biggest cost of the equation but that is understandable.

 

[bug]

My advise to anyone looking at a NAS, just build it yourself. A LGA 775/771 build would be plentiful for a file/Plex server. Just install NAS4Free or FreeNAS, both which are free. The HDDs will be the biggest cost of the equation but that is understandable.

Actually, the stuff I haven't figured out when building a storage solution is disk sourcing. If I build a NAS today with 3TB drives, if one disk fails three years from now, I'm going to need another (identical?) 3TB disk. And by then, even if I can still find the same model (doubtful), the sweetspot will have already moved towards higher capacities.
How do you guys replace your drives? Because if I figure this out, I may seriously start looking again into moving everything mechanical in a dedicated chassis.

 

[Breit]

Actually, the stuff I haven't figured out when building a storage solution is disk sourcing. If I build a NAS today with 3TB drives, if one disk fails three years from now, I'm going to need another (identical?) 3TB disk. And by then, even if I can still find the same model (doubtful), the sweetspot will have already moved towards higher capacities.
How do you guys replace your drives? Because if I figure this out, I may seriously start looking again into moving everything mechanical in a dedicated chassis.

Depends on your NAS build I guess.
If you use a hardware RAID controller, then using the exact same model of you hard disk is probably a good idea. If you use something like FreeNAS and configure your arrays with ZFS, then the choice of the particular hard disk model is not so restrictive.

If you expect to change hard disks regularly or plan to expand your array, then a mirrored vdev is probably the best choice. For dual-mirrors, you only need to add 2 disks of the same size (preferably the same model too) to expand the array. Replacing disks in the pool is also easy, just replace one disk with another of at least the same size. If you have replaced all disks in one vdev to ones with larger sizes, then you can even expand that vdev to its full size making you pool grow in size as well. Very nice feature.
All you have to give for that is ~50% space efficiency.

 

[crmaris]

Something went really wrong with the raid rebuilt/sync graphs (most likely an excel localisation problem). The table is correct.

(update: all corresponding graphs have been updated)