back to article Synology DS411slim Nas box

As technology progresses further into the twenty-first century, the most obvious trend is the miniaturisation of just about everything. While these changes have taken most aspects of new technology by storm, conventional storage however, has been left wanting. Synology DS411slim Synology's DS411slim four bay Nas relies on 2. …

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  1. petur
    Thumb Down

    QNAP

    QNAP has had such a model for at least 2 years, except that it has more memory (1GB) and is as fast as the 3.5" model... it even supports SSD

    See http://qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=120

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Old hat

    Apart from the CPU, is this any different from their DS 409slim that came out in 2009? That device made my shortlist then but eventually lost out to a QNAP SS-439 that had more RAM (up to 2GB) and 2 network connectors (handy for bonding for better performance) plus a VGA out which was handy for installing Debian instead of the crappy QNAP software.

  3. Anton Ivanov
    Grenade

    Nothing particularly "loathing" about jbod

    Nothing particularly "loathing" about jbod

    Jbod on a NAS with metadata on your media player main drive is the best way to store media. If the disk dies, oh well, whatever, you just get rip again from the original media.

    With JBOD + metadata elsewhere the drives spin down when not in use and only the drive which contains the media being played at a particular time is spun up. Also, you may find yourself in a situation with multiple clients and multiple streams - junior version 1 refusing to watch the same movie as junior version 2 (and so on by induction). In that case if you organize media by topic/age group you will end up with flawless performance even if everyone in the house decides to be a movie junkie at the same time.

    The price is also reasonable. If you assemble a DIY in a decent living room case using a mini-ITX motherboard (though that will hold 8-10 drives, not 4) it will cost about the same. Ditto for power usage. The numbers are pretty decent, but not out of the ordinary. A DIY system with a Via CPU can easily match them. The couple of DIY NAS-es I have in the house definitely manage similar numbers :)

  4. spl23

    Explains why the DS409slim vanished a few months ago...

    I bought a DS409slim just as they were getting hard to find to replace an ageing QNAP TS-201. I've been very pleased with it - very fast, masses of functionality, and very quiet in operation, the main advantage of 2.5" drives, which is important if you are using it as an audio server. This new model looks pretty much identical, albeit with double the RAM and a CPU that's 33% faster.

    Unless QNAP have fixed their firmware since the TS-209II, I suspect their version has a fan that never turns off - that was the main reason I ditched QNAP and went to Synology. Silence is golden...

  5. petur

    @spl

    QNAP uses bigger fans these days, and while not turning them off, they do run slower. Compared to the TS-209 I had before, a massive improvement.

    Actually, the synology fans are smaller and noisier than the QNAP ones, which made me ditch them and go QNAP :)

  6. Michael C

    The point?

    at 2.5", it's not much of a nas. For a fraction of the price you can get a 4TB dual disk simple NAS and trump this thing's storage, or for roughly the same price (chassis and drives) a 4 bay expandability 3.5" model with all the bells and whistles. I really don't see the point of this unit, as slight noise increase of a 3.5" unit shoudl be irrelevant considering a NAS likely would not be in the same room anyway (network cables can go anywhere... I have my NAS in a closet).

    Also, I gravitate to the QNAP line. They have significantly more software features beyond what Synology offers, and i actually use several of them... For a price within a few bucks on a $500-900 setup, I'll take the QNAP.

  7. Ian North

    HDD

    Does this support 12.5mm high drives or just 9.5mm?

  8. Conrad Longmore
    Boffin

    Hmmmm

    On the strength on an El Reg review I bought the related DS211j. Hmmmmm. It's a fine and well-engineered piece of kit and personally I like it, but really you need to be a techie to understand what the hell you are meant to do with it once you have screwed all the components together. Sure, that's fine for El Reg readers, but I wouldn't recommend it to a normal human being.

  9. Thruxton10

    another way of skinning the same cat....

    For those of you with spare PC's, using these along with some free or cheap NAS software off the net, some SAT or IDE raid cards plus some hard discs can be cheaper than buying an off the shelf solution.

    Plus its great fun building your own, and a green way of re-using your not quite top spec older PC's.

  10. petur
    FAIL

    @Thruxton10

    You're completely missing the point (several in fact):

    that old PC may be cheaper, but is is also way noisier, consumes way more power and produces more heat. I have several NAS boxes humming along quietly in an almost closed cabinet. The equivalent amount of PCs would not fit in there and instantly overheat when they would.

    A bit like taking your big car that seats 5 (or 7) to get some bread at the local bakery 500m away, instead of taking your bike. Overkill. Buy that bike now....

    1. Thruxton10
      FAIL

      @Petur

      You're missing several advantages:

      No 1 is that if the PC develops a fault, say PSU goes bang or memory fails... easy swap with replacement parts, so I can be back online within 15 minutes. you try doing that with a failed synology.....

      No 2 free NAS software such a FreeNas supports far more than an off the shelf solution. try the following features, Upnp, CIFS, NFS, Itunes, RSync, Unison, iSCSI, Support for UPS'es, Samba, Dynamic DNS, BitTorrent, AFP and SNMP, amongst other features. it also supports the use of PuTTY for those who like to Telnet in.

      No 3 is i can choose to put in a specific hardware raid card such as adaptec or more than one, dependent on the number of PCI slots, and configure the disc arrays exactly how i want, not have synology tell what I can and can't do.

      No 4, the home brew NAS is upgradeable, more memory? faster processor? higher spec board? no problem.

      No 5 One of my freenas boxes has a 64 bit PCI server motherboard, allowing the use of 64 bit PCI raid cards, I've bench marked its data throughput and its in well in excess of 200MBit/s (provided you have a gigabit card of course) which is more than what the Synology can do.

  11. Ed Uncle
    Thumb Down

    meh...

    Compared to the Proliant microserver - 4+1 Sata bays, near-silent, raid 0+1+JBOD, 1GB ram, 250GB hd included and dual core amd cpu and ati graphics, easily runs windows, *nix or freenas. £150 after £100 cash back from ebuyer.

    A little bigger of course, but WAY better value.

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