I recently bought the Synology DS210J NAS Box plus a couple of Seagate Barracuda ST32000542AS 2TB 3.5″ SATA II Hard Drive, this was to give me a shared network storage space of 4TB (well under 4TB once formatted) and be able to store all of my data requirements for now and in the future. I agree that 4TB will be used up and as this is only a 2Bay device – no way to expand internally but we shall cross that bridge when we come to it.
Why did I choose this device?
I knew what I needed out of a NAS box in that I did not want to spend too much money on the enclosure alone but at the same time I did not want it to be restricted to how big a hard drive I can fit into there. I also wanted the various servers many include such as Torrent server, iTunes Server and so forth. I pulled up a shopping site and listed the NAS Box’s starting from the cheapest and working my way down. Many were very bad design and had bad write ups and the rest were limited to say 500GIG drives (x2) and so forth. I read nothing but good reviews about the DS210J – it came in at £136 so that was not too bad, yes there was cheaper 2 Bay devices out there but a lot was missing.
What size drive to buy?
The next step was to work out which drives to buy, I already have 1 internal 1TB Drive in my Dell, do I just buy another 1TB Drive (which are very cheap at the moment) and live with 2TB max storage space? In fact I could have bought the Edimax NS-2502 NAS Box,which was only £99 and added that 1TB drive (£49) and spent half of what I did BUT I would have been limited to 2TB only and I know for a fact I can use this space quickly.
The Seagate Barracuda ST32000542AS 2TB 3.5″ SATA II Hard Drive is £76 – this is at the moment the cheapest drive from the site I was on – remember I wanted to save on shipping costs.
The initial setup
The device comes with no screws in, this allows you to slide the top of and you will see the bay for the two drives. The drive simply slides in, one on top of another and the install is done. You then use the supplied bag of screws to secure the drives and slide the top cover back on. You will find another bag of screws and these keep the unit as one, you are now ready to get the device on the network and set it up. Plug it in to the wall socket, plug the network lead into your router and switch on – now we move onto the software side.
You use the supplied CD and this does the initial process of finding the device on the network and installing something to the hard drive (firmware). This is a very short step and it soon open your default browser and from here – all set up is via the network / web browser.
As this is the initial setting up of the drives you just installed, we need to go to the Management section.
The storage section is were you create a new volume and you have a choice of automated set-up (where it choose what mode to format your drives) or custom. After choosing custom, it gives you the option first of checking your drives for bad blocks which it explains will take longer to complete and what type of volume you require. As you can see on the screenshot, it does tell you about each type on the right. In my case, I wanted the full capacity of the drives so RAID 1 was no good to me (as I would only have 2TB), so I choose RAID 0 – downside to this is that if the drive fails – I loose everything.
I started this process at 6pm on the 3rd Aug and it was checking the drive. at 8am the next morning, it finally finished that part and then proceed to do another check. I assume it is checking each drive in turn for bad sectors and 14 hours per drive is a long time but is it not better to be safe then sorry even if it takes me 3 days at this rate to format the drive.
What else can this thing do?
As it has not completed a full format, I plugged in a 60GIG USB Drive, this came up and I was able to share this out straight away. I was then able to test out the download station. While some NAS boxes have a torrent server (normally transmission) this goes one step further. You get a client which you can install on your windows, Linux or Mac box and you can send most downloads to this and the NAS box picks up and grabs the content. It can handle torrent files, NZB (News servers), emule and FTP along with others. The handy thing about this is you can let the NAS box get on with the task of downloading the files long after you have switched off all your computers and fell alseep.
Other servers?
The box has many others to choose from and as it runs linux, you can add extra one’s such as a email server or a squeezebox server. This is not meant to be a definate all in one review of this unit, this is to come later once I have the drive formatted and the files all stored on there. So far then – I am 100% more happy with this device then the Pogoplug for example or even the DIY NAS Box I built with FreeNAS.
USB expansion
I plan to plug in 2x 1TB external USB Drives and a 500GIG Model to give me 7TB+ of space – this should keep me going for a while and I can stop worry about were to store a file.
**Update**
It finished formatting the drives after the second round of checking at 10:30pm and then I had to tick the various services (photostation, itunes server etc) for it to make the automated directories of Audio, Video, Music. I went into Share management and added other directories I need and set permissions on that all as read/write. The box now appears in network neighbourhood and I can map drives as required.
