Plaidophile

FIrst off, this is basically a little turnkey ARM-based Linux box that does pretty much anything you'd want a NAS to do. It has easy-to-configure RAID, it has a DLNA server (great for streaming media to a Playstation or the like), the whole web interface is based on Postgres and PHP which you can also use to run your own websites if you want (including vhost support), a web-based media streaming interface, and all sorts of other useful crap.

The initial setup was a little bit weird. To set it up you need to install your drives, then install the OS on it, which requires the use of a GUI client. They only provide clients for OSX and Windows, although presumably the Windows one will work from Wine or the like. The only tricky bit was figuring out which of the several OS images to use, as it wasn't particularly clear. (Do yourself a favor and just download the latest one from Synology's website — also a confusing process, however, and it doesn't help that OSX's unzip tool is subtly broken).

Once it's set up, though, it's just a matter of creating a volume, and then creating shares on that volume. There are also a number of applications/plugins, many preinstalled, which set up shares of their own as well; for example, the media server app sets up music, photo, and video shares.

Originally I only bought two 2TB drives and figured I'd expand the array later, but then I got nervous about RAID's reshape process and bought another two. As an experiment, I loaded some files onto the NAS with the two drives, then added the other two. The reshape process was quite slow and would have taken about 10 hours to complete, so I scuttled that and just reformatted the system. Creating the RAID-5 on all four drives ended up taking... about 10 hours. So, assuming the reshape process is successful, it's... no slower than starting from scratch, at least.

The device is amazingly quiet. Ever since I turned off my PowerMac, my studio room is just amazingly quiet. Sure, it makes noise, but it's just a gentle whisper, rather than the low rumble of the PowerMac. It also takes significantly less power, especially when idle (going with WD's green drives didn't hurt either).

My one big concern with it from a hardware standpoint is that the top two drives run fairly hot - 41/42°C, which seems a little high. The fan is positioned in front of the lower two drives, and that combined with hot air generally rising means that of course the top two drives will be a bit warmer. There are a number of discussions on the Synology forums about improving the airflow (with obligatory disclaimers from Synology) but for now I'll just live with it. I figure Western Digital's RMA process is reasonable enough anyway, so as long as only one of the drives fails I'm fine.

That leads me to one... well, not complaint so much as area for improvement. I use CrashPlan for my offsite backups and disaster recovery. That's even more important to me now that my NAS and my Time Machine backup are (effectively) on the same drive. Unfortunately, there's no way to cleanly get CrashPlan to back up the DS410j; CrashPlan's Linux client is Java-based but uses x86 JNI methods, and the DS410j doesn't have a Java runtime anyway (nor would I expect it to have enough RAM to do it effectively). What I've been doing is using my Mac's CrashPlan client to also index the DS410j's shares, but that only works if they're mounted when CrashPlan runs, as CrashPlan won't automount them.

There's also a few other impedance mismatches between the DS410j and OSX; since OSX's filesystem is case-insensitive but case-preserving, and the DS410j's is case-sensitive, sometimes weird stuff happens if you try copying large nested folders directly between the two. There's no problem doing it to Time Machine or other NAS-hosted sparsebundles, of course, but at least for my initial NAS usage I ended up just using rsync instead.

Oh, and rsync does work quite nicely; the DS410j allows ssh logins, and has rsync in it (it even has a web-based GUI to allow automated rsyncing from the DS410 to another device, such as another NAS or an rsync-friendly remote offsite service or the like). By default, only admin/root can ssh in (root has the same password as admin), but it's easy enough to allow other users to ssh as well by editing /etc/passwd) and setting them to have a valid shell.

The NAS works pretty well, and the DLNA server also works great. I'd tried several DLNA servers with my PS3 in the past and none of them seemed to work right, but the one in the DS410j Just Worked right out of the box, and now I can easily stream my videos and music and such to it. There's also an iTunes server, so you can use any PC/Mac iTunes as a more direct client to it (which is nice if you want shuffle-by-album or whatever). Unfortunately, it doesn't have any way of synchronizing to an iPod, so if you want that, you'll still need to do that through iTunes on another machine. I briefly tried setting my iTunes library to use the NAS's music share as its library location, but as always that led to Issues, so for now I'm just keeping my iTunes library on my MacBook (which is less painful since upgrading its hard drive to 500GB) and periodically rsyncing my music collection to the NAS for streaming purposes.

Oh, and there is also an app called Download Station which allows you to download files from many sources (http, ftp, bittorrent, eMule, and possibly others). Life in the modern age seems to involve telling Download Station to download a video file and then a few minutes later being able to watch it on my PS3 without having to do any fiddly crap. You can also have it subscribe to RSS feeds and it will automatically periodically fetch any new things — theoretically great for video podcasts, torrent-based media subscriptions, and so on, although I haven't tested it.

There are a whole bunch of other apps both pre-installed and available for download, and they provide some libraries to make your own pretty apps as well. I haven't messed with it, but if you want a nice hackable, extendable server for whatever purposes, it seems like a great way to go.

A few other miscellaneous things: it supports quite a few 802.11n USB dongles (I've been considering getting one so I'm not reliant on my crappy Netgear 11n bridge to get it online), it supports Zeroconf/Bonjour mDNS broadcast (but it won't resolve mDNS names itself, annoyingly enough), and while the web-based UI for RAID management is pretty good it's not complete so it's still useful to ssh in as root and do mdadm things (which it still gives complete access to). Also, it can be configured to email you various status messages and error reports; so far I've just gotten occasional messages about it failing to sync NTP, but hopefully there'll also be reports for the inevitable "your RAID is running degraded" message.

Performance is good enough for me. I haven't done any benchmarking, and I don't plan to. I'm sure a Drobo would be a bit faster, but a Drobo also doesn't do NAS without a hugely expensive add-on, and the need to "safely shutdown" a Drobo before unplugging it from a laptop seemed a bit... severe. (That last bit is the main reason why I went with the Synology instead, although all the other stuff that I'm doing with the Synology that I wouldn't have even considered with the Drobo is a nice bonus.)

Basically, this is a great device for doing all sorts of off-the-shelf home server things if you're a middle-of-the-road user like me, who doesn't want to set up a Linux RAID up themselves but also doesn't want something that's just "durr plug-and-play oh sorry you lost your data? too bad!"