My review on Synology DiskStation Diskless Attached DS412
This NAS box is a great product. Well-designed interface, easy to get around, but does require a little bit of geek knowledge. This thing can be your DHCP or DNS server or both. If you're not a geek, plan to call one or spend hours on youtube figuring it out. It can be your fileserver for Mac or PC or FTP or even iSCSI LUN. It can do radius or LDAP. Has a bunch of other apps you can download and try (like iTunes server, plex server, mail server, web server, vpn etc etc etc). It does have an application for camera surveillance for one single camera (and you can buy other licenses for additional cameras). Bear in mind that the camera licenses for the surveillance product are around $50 per camera starting with your 2nd camera (first is free), but hopefully synology will get smart and price it more reasonably in the near future. For those that have been using dropbox, cloud station software on this diskstation does a reasonably good job as a dropbox alternative. While the cloud station devices (aka your laptop, your computer, the disk station) are all on the same local area network, synchronization is a bit slower than you would otherwise get on dropbox - but it does the job. Warning- do not buy regular cheapo SATA drives, this thing needs NAS quality SATA drives! Go to's synology.com and check the drive compatibility matrix before you buy SATA drives for this device. Raid-5 or SHR raid both allow you to recover from one drive failure out of four. Since this is a 4-drive box, expect around three drives worth of storage capability. One other note, it does not read Mac HFS drives! Do not expect to attach a Mac drive via USB and be recognizable. For Mac users, if you are moving large chunks of data to your disk station for initial move, you must reformat a usb drive as NTFS on your mac and copy the files over. So plan to buy paragon's NTFS for mac. You can do FAT if the files are small in size and short in name. the plex server - don't expect to copy MKV files and have the disk station be a plex server for MKV files (25GB in size for 1080p/2hrs). If you can compress you HDX 1080p movie files down to about 5GB-8GB per 2-hour video on mp4 or m4v, then you'll be fine using plex on diskstation. One other thing that's cool - you can do static LAG on the gig-e ports of the diskstation to double the ethernet bandwidth to 2Gb/s- but make sure the switch can be configured for LAG first or you'll lose the diskstation's connectivity.
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9 comments:
We received the Synology DiskStation DS412+ about a week ago, and had purchased two Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB SATA III drives for it. The drives installed easily, and the system is designed to pretty much set it self up. For some reason, we had problems getting the 412+ to recognize and properly install the WD drives. But after a couple of attempts, it finally installed everything perfectly.
Aside from the glitches getting it up and running, now it is fantastic. We use it mostly for storing large professional photography images and to pass 25 meg raw photo files fairly fast. Once it was working we created the sharing folders and then mapped network drives to our PCs, so everything is fast and efficient.
I'd recommend this to anyone. It is designed so that you don't have to be a computer geek to get it working, and has a lot of functionality we will never use, for for handling large files and being able to work on them on various computers, this has exceeded our expectations.
I chose to purchase the DS412+ after deciding to upgrade my DS213 Air less then a month after having it due to wanting more space as the Synology NAS makes accessing my media from anywhere (android phones and tablets, iPad, PS3, and Roku with Plex app) incredibly easy!! I had some fear that I would get to copy all my data manually to the new unit. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to migrate to the new unit with all my data in less then 15 minutes. Here is what it entailed: 1) remove the drives from the old unit; 2) place them in the new unit (making sure they stay in the same order 1:1 2:2; 3) Power-up the new unit; 4) run the Synology Assistant; 5) after it locates the unit, it tells you that it's migrateable and then does the work; 6) Told that it could take 10 minutes (it didn't) and then I was logging into my new unit. All the data was there!! I did have to repair the various apps (Audio, Video, and Photo Station) but that took only a minute each and then re-indexed my movie database and I'm back to where I was prior to the move. Now I have added a third drive to the array for that needed elbow-room with a couple clicks and now it's setting up the array across my three drives. LOVE my Synology NAS!!!
I received my Synology two days ago - on first impressions, the 412+ is an excellent NAS solution. Those complaining about the plastic drive sleds and or the case - don't get it. Given the price/performance of the Synology and the applications that ship with the unit are top notch. The combination of fast CPU,RAM and Synology's DSM software clearly turn the Synolgy into a full fledged enterprise like NAS solution.
I should note I am upgrading from a couple of Drobos. I didn't realize how bad Drobo's performed until I booted the Synology. Drobo's are extremely slooow and the SW/firmware wt DROBO is just garbage compared to Synology. After two days I've migrated 4TB of data which is extremely fast. A Drobo would take almost a week to transfer a similar amount of data. Additionally the Synology is almost silent compared to slow and noisey Drobo product.
I would highly recommend spending the extra money and look to the Plus series due to the increased performance gains from the additional RAM and CPU. The small uplift in exchange for a life of superior performance is worth it.
I installed and configed the 412Plus using the stock firmware. I wanted to see how the unit performed out of the box without an update. I experienced ZERO problems. After I gen'ed the disks, I upgraded the firmware.
More updates after I complete my 10TB migration.
6/20 update
After migrating 8TB of data, I decided to move the unit to it's permanent location, powered down the unit and discovered what many have called the Blue Light of Death - a blinking light. I wasn't sure if this was an error or the unit was simply booting the disks. After a min or so of BLOD - I depressed the power button again, this time depressing the power switch for a few seconds - the units beeped - and quickly re-booted. I am wondering if this is the flashing blue led people are complaining about. In closing, I am so impressed with the Synology DS412+ I purchased another unit from Amazon. Synology is great Drobo is garbage.
The 412+ had some problems during the initial setup, the volume was crashing all the time with Seagate 3 Tb HDDs. However it worked fine after I have upgraded the HDDs' firmware. So far so good, no problems, easy and alot faster than the 411. Great device overall.
I did a lot of research on which NAS device to purchase. After purchasing this device for $650 and four WD Red 3TB hard drives for around $150 each, the grand total was at $1,250. With that in mind, I didn't want to spend any more than that. With technology, there is always a faster and more expensive version available. You just need to know where to draw the line.
I had also considered the DS413 ($500) and the DS1512+ ($800). The DS413 was $100 cheaper and the specs looked very similar to the DS412+. The only major difference was the processor speed (1.06GHz vs 2.13GHz). I then discovered that the DS412+ had the Intel Atom processor, while the DS413 had a cheaper, PPC processor. The DS1512+ was $150 more than the DS412+; however, it not only supported one more additional drive, it was capable of expanding to 15 supported drives by attaching two more DS1512+ devices to it. In addition, the DS1512+ was capable of expanding its memory to 3GB, but the processor was the exact same as the DS412+ (Intel Atom D2700).
Overall, I purchased the DS412+ since it had the Intel Atom processor and because supported 4 drives (SHR 9TB of storage w/ 4x3TB drives). I chose Synology because of their DSM layout and ease of use/support. I strongly recommend this device!
we bought this as an upgrade to our netgear readynas, which was pretty good for it's time but as we increased the drive size it became slower and slower. this box is amazingly fast, felt the difference immediately. the web interface for admin is also great and easy to use. only hiccup we had was setting up ftp and remote admin access, because we have to go through a sonicwall firewall it required our it guy to configure.
we've had it for about 3 months and so far so good.
Been using the Synology Diskstation DS412 for a month now. I had an old disk that I put in along with 2 new ones...well it warned me when the old one was going bad. Did a hot swap, never lost any data, it is a very nice, fast,sweet NAS. I highly recommend.
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