[lugm.org] NAS - Synology

[Nishal Goburdhan]

On Mar 21, 2012, at 12:00 PM, pascal maya wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> This is an SOS call to the Mauritian Linux Community. Can you guide and help me locate a reliable supplier in Mauritius to purchase a Synology DS412+ .
> Any other relevant/similar alternatives(Qnap, Lacie, Dlink, etc), your more than welcomed to suggest.
> Setting up a FreeNAS is not an option, I'm looking for a small compact solution with easy backup and restoration with RAID builtin.
> Is Dropo an expensive alternative to other similar products ??? BTW Dropo suppliers here in MAU ?

it's drobo. :-)
 they're not cheap, but if you want a fire-and-forget solution, then this works well (i have one at home).
it's formatted for use with AFP (yes, go ahead and laugh logan, we only have macs at home!), and it Just Works (tm).
my non-technical significant other is trained to look at the three colours (green, orange, red, and act accordingly - ie.  green=don't touch;  orange=tell me;  red=swap disk with spare, and tell me).  i used to spend quite a bit of time travelling, and, ease-of-use, trumped all else, hence my decision to go drobo.

the local reseller is paoma, in curepipe - www.paoma.mu.  very helpful - not that there is much to do! 


> What could be the approximate cost for purchasing that kind of hardware here in MAU ?

i bought my 4drive unit 2 years ago, with 2x 1TB disks;  it wasn't cheap at the time (+30K iirc) and i got a discount because i also purchased a UPS and other peripherals as well.

i've seen smaller synology units (2 disk) in stock at ct-zone at bagatelle for ±11K.  
ispace-technologies - www.ispace-technologies.com - in ebene also had QNAP units in stock, when i was there 2 weeks ago.

as ajay mentioned, most of these units use proprietary raid systems to give you the expandable raid array options (what drobo sells as the any-size disk-grow-as-you-need-raid-array).  while this works great when it works, i've read lots of horror stories of people trying to get the data recovered when something fails.  same with synology's SHR system - we recently purchased one for office use in ZA, and the supplier warned -against- using their SHR (expandable array) option for our data storage purposes.  ymmv.

yo should also know that these raid5+1 systems take absolutely forever to rebuild - i recently swapped a 1TB for a 2TB drive to get to (2+1+2+2), and the volume rebuild took more than 30 hours!  of course it's useable during this period, but that might affect your data usage/storage systems.  (as a home user, this didn't impact me too much)

i've been thinking about a backup NAS, and, speaking from a drobo user's perspective, i doubt i will buy this again.
both qnap and synology seem to offer the same options at almost the same price point;  both of which are well below drobo's.
while i love the simplicity:
* it's expensive by comparison
* there are cutesy home features in the other two that drobo lacks (built-in media server, etc.)

don't get me wrong - the unit works great.  it's just expensive by comparison *for home use*

the single largest technical benefit i've seen is that even my old unit will scale to 4x 4TB.  looking through the whitepapers for synology and qnap, most of their non-professional units will not support 4TB drives (some not even 3TB).

hth,
--n.

btw, if you're willing to look for suppliers in ZA for these, ping me offlist.
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