As some of you may have seen from a previous post, i purchased a Thecus N7700 pro NAS a few years back…… i was most unimpressed by this NAS.

The performance was poor, the AD integration simply doesn’t work, the iscsi is flaky and the support is non-existant……

So, when this NAS reached capacity, it was time for a new one…. i tossed up between QNAP and Synology, both of which seem to have generally positive reviews around the web and friends/clients that have them speak of them is a generally positive light.

I eneded up getting a Synology 2413+, after changing my mind from a Synology 1813+…. i figured the bit extra was worth the extra bays. After some consideraton – the reasons i ended up going with synology over QNAP were

1) Price – Synology gear was/is a reasonable amount cheaper than the equivalent QNAP gear

2) Expandability – The synology NAS’s i was looking at can both be expanded by adding up to 2 additional, 5 bay enclosures…. i really like that

3) The UI – After having a play around with friends QNAPs and Synology solutions… Synology DSM 4.1 is a nice interface

After making my mind up, i purcahsed the 2413+ and the 2GB RAM expansion from techbuy.com.au and 5 x WD Red 3TB drives from a local supplier, i wanted to start off with 8, but couldnt find anywhere that had that many in stock…. the prices locally on these drives were 15-20% cheaper than techbuy or other large australian online stores… (and no, not from MSY – I tend to avoid those incompetent thieves)

Setup of the device was quick and simple, creating a port trunk on the NAS and enabling LACP on the switch took less than 5 minutes all up….. copying the data from the old thecus NAS then proceeded to take 3.5 days….

Once this was completed – and the Thecus was still on…. i just did some basic testing by copying large files (10GB+) to my PC from each NAS…. average from the thecus was around 20-25MB/Sec… average from the Synology was around 95-100MB/Sec…. the limiting factor here would have been my PC, which only has the one 1GB interface…. but a very big difference between the two already.

The synology is also dead quiet, compared to a roudy thecus, but this may partly be the difference in drives…. WD RED 3TB’s in the synology, WD EARS 2TB greens in the thecus.

The AD integration on the synology works… not exactly a big deal…. but after fighting with the thecus for so long its nice to have something that “just works”…

In the next week or so (when the additional drives turn up) ill be expanding the RAID, testing out the iSCSI target functionality and later again, testing out the surveillance station app….. so I will update this article when this happens…. I hope the RAID expansion and iscsi has been as simple as everything else.

So far…. the Synology kicks the absolute shit out of the thecus…. not because the Synology is brilliant (although it does seem to be good), but because the thecus is so bad.

* Update 23/01/2013 *

I finally got the additional 3 x WD 3TB red drives – whacked them in and expanded the volume. The wording of the expansion dialogue makes it sound like the expansion is going to wipe out the entire RAID volume…. which is enough to give anyone a heart attack…. but what it really means it that its going to wipe out the new expansion disks.

Took 3 days to expand- but outside of the poor wording of the dialogue box, it was very simple.

Next up, setting up an iSCSI target…. was an absolute breeze and “just worked”…..

Haven’t got my camera’s yet, so that’s next on the list – i’ll update again when I do.

In summary though – the Synology so far has been very good…… haven’t had to use support as yet…. which is a good thing – but that’s really the last major question I have about Synology before recommending this device.

* Update 28/03/2013 *

After a fair wait, i recieved my foscam IP camera’s yesterday…. these devices are cheap and nasty-ish…. but considering the price difference between foscam and others – the foscams do seem to represent reasonable value….

Anyhoo – unfortunately the Surveillance Station does not yet support the foscam FI9802W or FI9821W. From doing some digging around, this is primarily because these devices did not support RTSP until a recent firmware upgrade…. hopefully they will be supported soon.
On thing i have noticed is the ludicrous price of the licensing for additional cameras as part of Surveillance Station, not only that, but when purcahsing it seems (and other comments seem to confirm it) that the licenses are physically shipped to your address instead of being sent via email or via some other online method – how fucked up is that! Obviously the licensing people at synology are still living in the 70’s.

* Update 18/12/2013 *

I gave up on Synology offering these licenses in a logical way, so I ordered them from a local supplier…. who, I just found out, they cant get until January (sometime)…. good job Synology. Your NAS’s are great, but your surveillance station licensing model sucks arse.