News - Synology starts to ship the DiskStation DS414slim

[HEXUS]

It’s the successor to the popular 4 x 2.5-inch drive packing DS411slim.

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[Jowsey]

I have a couple guys who are going to move in with me for a couple months soon and we all want to get something set up like a NAS. But with 3 people potentially accessing and streaming 1080p content at the same time I'm just not sure if something like this would be appropriate. We are debating throwing together a cheap box together with a AMD quadcore and just load that up with hard drives and bang on some open source OS. Any words of wisdom from people?

[crossy]

I have a couple guys who are going to move in with me for a couple months soon and we all want to get something set up like a NAS. But with 3 people potentially accessing and streaming 1080p content at the same time I'm just not sure if something like this would be appropriate. We are debating throwing together a cheap box together with a AMD quadcore and just load that up with hard drives and bang on some open source OS. Any words of wisdom from people?

Based on my (very limited) NAS use, the big plus for building your own box is that you can load the sucker with network cards and especially drives. Problem with streaming multiple files is that you need a good wide network pipe and, especially, decent storage bandwidth. Ideal for the latter (based on research) seems to be a RAID5/6/etc array of SSD's. Trouble with that is the usual SSD tradeoff of capacity v's speed.

For media centre use though an SSD is heaven sent - no head to move to slow streaming speeds, no tick tick tick noises when it's reading and low power consumption. And last time I checked you can get about 600GB of SSD (using 6x120GB drives) for about £300.

Good thing about this box is that you just buy the box, slap in 4 240GB SSD's (£330 worth) and you've got a 720GB media centre - nice. Make sure it's hooked up to a Gigabit link and you might be in business - minimum hassle.

[Jowsey]

I have a couple guys who are going to move in with me for a couple months soon and we all want to get something set up like a NAS. But with 3 people potentially accessing and streaming 1080p content at the same time I'm just not sure if something like this would be appropriate. We are debating throwing together a cheap box together with a AMD quadcore and just load that up with hard drives and bang on some open source OS. Any words of wisdom from people?

Based on my (very limited) NAS use, the big plus for building your own box is that you can load the sucker with network cards and especially drives. Problem with streaming multiple files is that you need a good wide network pipe and, especially, decent storage bandwidth. Ideal for the latter (based on research) seems to be a RAID5/6/etc array of SSD's. Trouble with that is the usual SSD tradeoff of capacity v's speed.

For media centre use though an SSD is heaven sent - no head to move to slow streaming speeds, no tick tick tick noises when it's reading and low power consumption. And last time I checked you can get about 600GB of SSD (using 6x120GB drives) for about £300.

Good thing about this box is that you just buy the box, slap in 4 240GB SSD's (£330 worth) and you've got a 720GB media centre - nice. Make sure it's hooked up to a Gigabit link and you might be in business - minimum hassle.

All bedrooms are hooked up with Gigabit ethernet and media pc will be hooked up via powerline.

NAS will be stored on top of my wardrobe and connected via ethernet (in this case it would be both LAN ports). For 3 guys who have large DVD and bluray collections that will be ripped and stored on the server ( plus ancillary water based downloading...)

My personal computer has a 2 tb hard drive 80% full so we would be looking for atleast 4-6 tb of storage (just looked and this NAS only supports 1.5tb drives so maybe this particular NAS isn't appropriate for me)

Thanks for the advice bud.

[crossy]

All bedrooms are hooked up with Gigabit ethernet and media pc will be hooked up via powerline. NAS will be stored on top of my wardrobe and connected via ethernet (in this case it would be both LAN ports).

Same setup as I have/had. One thing I will say though - based on experience you might be better to see if the NAS can be plugged into router directly if you can. Media PC likewise - although I'd be very careful who's PLE units you use. I just got a pair of Devolo's "650+" spec ones and to be brutal I don't see much change over the "AV+" I had before - other than the 650's are recognised as Gigabit, whereas the AV+'s are only Fast Ether. Replaced ALL my PLE's with Devolo AV spec gear a while ago and haven't had any problems - they run cool and reliable. Use an AV Wireless+ in the bedroom to give me 3 network ports (PC and XBox) plus 802.11n wireless for tablets - and that's good enough to be able to stream 5oD programmes to my Note 10.1 tablet. And these are the old (200Mb/s) AV+'s rather than the newer 500Mb/s gear.

My personal computer has a 2 tb hard drive 80% full so we would be looking for atleast 4-6 tb of storage (just looked and this NAS only supports 1.5tb drives so maybe this particular NAS isn't appropriate for me)

Not sure if you're interested, but Aria sent me a newsletter yesterday - they're selling the 4TB WD Red's for £113 inc VAT. Cheap 4-way NAS and 4 of these in a RAID 0+1 setup? 8TB of mirrored storage for £400 and change - nice!

Thanks for the advice bud.

You are definitely welcome - wish I could've done more.

[semo]

I bet this will be more expensive than an NL54 for a long time and I'll bet you can't stick 16GB of ECC RAM in it and use zfs or RAIDz.