Synology

I have mine set to RAID 1 so I if one disk fails the other still holds my data.

 

I'd do Hybrid. It's basically Raid 5 but with the difference that the drives don't have to be the same/similar size and brand.

 

The initial format should have only taken a few minutes. Used to take hours, but a recent update fixed that. Did you download the latest firmware? Or did you use the old one from the included CD?

 

I set up my DS211 as Hybrid and it works fine....as stated above, make sure you're using the latest firmware and drives that are known to work with the Synology.

 

Hybrid, latest firmware from the website, running very smoothly!

 

I have a DS-1511+ with 5x2TB Hitachi a7k2000 drives setup in RAID6. Running the latest DSM.
Failover connections (1Gbps each).

Use it for Media, Photos, VMWare Virtual Machines and TimeMachine Backup. Was also pretty easy to setup Crashplan as headless client to do autonomous backups in the background. I really like it for the money paid.

 

To use my DS411J, I just click on it where it shows up in the left side of my Finder window, and drag files to it. I only use the web interface to change settings.

 

That's your problem. The web interface uses a Java file uploader..mostly meant for remote access. Use Finder..it will be exponentially faster.

 

I have a DS212j with no RAID nor JBOD (both disk formatted as basic) with USB drives plugged on the synology for backup.

 

remote backups seem like an ok idea but i find them to be a whole lot slower then a nas drive in my home on a closed network. I have tried many "cloud" drives and it was taking so long to upload it was like this is fracking stupid it will take me 4 years at this rate.

 

I have 3 2TB WD drives in a DS411 set up as RAID-5 for capacity and redundancy. At some point, I will add a 4th drive. I have an Applescript which mounts my drives if I'm connected to my home network and I navigate around using Finder or the CLI.

 

I've got a very similar setup to this and could not be happier. On a wired 1 Gb connection I get transfer speeds of up to 110MB/sec.
I use it it predominantly as a media server (via an iMac running iTunes) but also for all my time machine back ups (3 computers). I've only had her for a few months but super impressed so far

 

I have a DS411j with three 3TB WD drives. I set them up as hybrid. The initial format took several days. From there, I started copying approx. 3TB of data which took the expected amount of time on my gigabit switch.

The Synology DSM OS will index your media, whether you want it to or not. For all my music and video files, it took over a week to index. During that time the NAS was pretty slow. The CPU was pegged at 100% (or near enough), which effected network performance.

Obviously this concerned me, and I did a lot of reading on the web, and found similar stories. Six month later, and I have no issues.

I've owned several NAS boxes, and I think Synology is the best so far.

 

carr1on, are you sure you've not fallen victim to the misaligned partition problem with large WD drives?

http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=151&t=24099

If you didn't use a new version of Disk Manager, it won't have created the partitions properly (specifically, starting at the right disk block).

It's all down to WD using 4K block sizes instead of the old 512byte block sizes to improve performance.

 

You need to ensure that you have activated the Mac File Service.
Connect to your NAS via your browser and log in as admin. Go to Control Panel > Win/Mac/NFS and put a tick in the 2 boxes.

Your NAS comes pre-configured with 3 system folders; music, photo and video. Connect to your NAS via your browser and log in as admin. Go to Control Panel > Shared Folder and make sure that each user has the correct permissions to use those folders. I'm assuming that you have already configured your users for the NAS with the SAME short user names that you have on your Mac.

For your music you need to once again go to Control Panel and go to Media Server and then the Indexed Folder tab. Ensure that the three default folders are showing and are indexed. You then need to configure the iTunes server. Go to Control Panel > iTunes and enable the iTunes Service. Give it a shared name that will show up in Finder on your Mac, I called mine NAS but you can call it DiskStation or anything you want.

You can then place your music files in the music folder on your NAS and point iTunes on your Mac to the /music folder on your NAS.

I have a DS1511+ and this is my first NAS. I find it easy to manage and it usually loads all types of media as fast as if it were on my local Mac. I have around 16,000 songs and a few hundred movies/tv shows loaded on my NAS. From a re-boot of my Mac, when I open iTunes on my Mac and click on my NAS in the left hand pane, it takes about 60 seconds to load up all 17,000 items. If I then quit iTunes and re-start it 60 seconds later, it finds all my NAS items within seconds.

To sum up, the areas you need to check are that

1. You are using disks that are supported for your NAS check the Synology website for this.
2. You have created a volume correctly for your needs (I suggest you start with the default setting of Synology Hybrid Raid with data protection if 1 disk fails)
3. Enable those three default directories onto that volume 1
4. Create the users and give them appropriate permissions
5. Set up the media server
6. set up iTunes
7. enable the mac file service.
8. From your Mac dump some media files and check the responsiveness of the system.

There is a lot of detail that I have missed out but these are the broad main steps that you need to look at.

 

No probs Mario,

post back if you are still having trouble and I will help if I can. Ahh just read that you returned your Synology. At least if you get another you will know how to set it up now

 

Can DS212J stream ALAC?

I'm thinking about getting a DS212J.

I rip all my CDs to iTunes in ALAC. I want to stream these in full resolution to a Naim Audio UnitiQute (which after an upcoming board upgrade will support ALAC and up to 24/192 streaming), but can't tell whether I can do that with ALAC files. Is this possible. Is anyone doing that?