{"id":6520,"date":"2016-09-05T12:00:54","date_gmt":"2016-09-05T11:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=6520"},"modified":"2016-09-04T22:41:09","modified_gmt":"2016-09-04T21:41:09","slug":"first-weeks-synology-diskstation-nas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2016\/09\/first-weeks-synology-diskstation-nas.htm","title":{"rendered":"My first few weeks with a Synology Diskstation NAS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this summer, I bought myself a new NAS. I’d lost faith in my old Netgear ReadyNAS devices<\/a> a while ago, after a failure took out both halves of a\u00a0RAID 1 mirror and I lost all the data on one of them. That actually taught me two important lessons:<\/p>\n

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  1. Data doesn’t exist unless it’s backed up in at least two places.<\/li>\n
  2. RAID 1 is not suitable for fault-tolerant backups.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    As I wrote a few weeks ago<\/a>, my new model is to\u00a0get all of the data\u00a0into\u00a0one place, then sync\/archive\u00a0as appropriate to the cloud. Anything on any other PCs, external disks, etc. should be considered transient.<\/p>\n

    For the device itself, it seems that there are only really two vendors to consider \u2013 QNAP or Synology (maybe a Drobo). I chose Synology – and elected to go with a 4-bay model, picking up a Synology Diskstation DS916+<\/a>\u00a0(8GB) and kitting it out with 4 Hitachi (HGST) Deskstar NAS drives.<\/p>\n

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    Look what arrived yesterday (instead of next Monday) :-) @spandotcom<\/a> under-promised and over-delivered. Thanks guys! pic.twitter.com\/ovkaX3SIQd<\/a><\/p>\n

    \u2014 Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) July 14, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Unfortunately, I had a little hiccup in that I’d ordered the device pre-configured. The weight of the disks was clearly too much for the plastic drive carriers to cope with but, once again, span.com<\/a> sorted things out for me and I soon had a replacement in my possession.<\/p>\n

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    Up and running now with replacement NAS – guess shipping a unit with drives pre-installed was too much to handle https:\/\/t.co\/bLPoPIj28E<\/a><\/p>\n

    \u2014 Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) July 17, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Over the last few weeks, I’ve been building up what I’m doing with the Diskstation: providing home drives for the family; syncing all of my cloud storage<\/a>;\u00a0acting as a VPN endpoint<\/a>; providing DHCP and DNS services; running anti-virus checks; and backing up key files to Microsoft Azure.<\/p>\n

    This last workload is worthy of discussion, as it took me a couple of weeks to push my data to the cloud. Setup was fairly straightforward, following Paris Polyzos (@ppolyzos<\/a>)’s advice to backup Synology NAS data in Microsoft Azure Cool Storage<\/a>\u00a0but the volume of data and the network it had to traverse was more problematic.<\/p>\n

    Initially I had issues with timeouts due to a TP-Link HomeplugAV (powerline Ethernet) device between the ISP router and the DNS server that kept failing. I worked around that by moving DNS onto the NAS, and physically locating the NAS next to the router (bypassing the problematic section of network). Then it was just a case of waiting for my abysmal home Internet\u00a0connection to cope with multi-GB upstream transfers…<\/p>\n

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    #Azure<\/a> backup 2% complete after 4.5 hours… matches my calculations but so much for FTTC being fast! #UKBroadband<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/T9Zy2Cm5hO<\/a><\/p>\n

    \u2014 Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) August 14, 2016<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n