Synology DS 210j review

My solution was based on a super old computer and FreeNAS. It was a pretty good solution but:

• It wasn't setup for redundancy (I've been extremely lucky so far as I don't remember ever having a hard drive crashing)
• It was running out of space
• It was quite power consuming
• The torrent client wasn't super stable

To solve my two first issues I would have had to buy new IDE hard drives (remember the desktop is old) or another PCI card to do the bridge for SATA disks). You can find cheap cards, but that was again, more DiY in an already busy box. FreeNAS could have done some software RAID which fulfilled my main issue.

I was willing to give a try to a ready-to-go NAS solution, convinced that in the long run it could be even cheaper (with the power consumption) and with less maintenance.

The choice

I wanted:

• A network filesystem that is replicated on different disks
• A DLNA server so I can watch movies from the NAS straight on my DLNA-ready TV

I wished

• A good bittorrent client with watched folders... But I know nothing would compete with Transmission+RSS downloader+file organizer.
• A simple HTTP server could be handy to easily share some documents with some people, but it was a no-brainer I expected this to be available anyway

I looked around for a NAS, I often heard of Synology and Drobo as being reliable.

Price helped choosing and the comparison of Synology products as well. The differences between the models are not that big and very often are only based on RAM, CPU and max capacity. At that time I didn't care about RAM and CPU since the goal was to just deliver files to 1 or 2 clients...

So I went ahead and bought the DS210j with 2*1TB hard-drives from the super cool swiss online store Digitec for 435CHF (375USD)

The setup

I took the "standard" setup for harddrive which sounds like RAID1 but then differenciate from RAID1, it may have been a mistake as I don't see the difference and I'm now afraid that if the box dies, I would have to buy a Synology box to be able to read my drives. I really don't know it's just an afterthought.

It took around 5 hours to complete the process of preparing the harddrives.

I could setup users and groups easily (well I have 2 users and only 1 that is really used...), I could create shared folders for Windows and share those though NFS as well. Easy enough.

Goal no1 was complete, from any computer of the house I can browse my files.

For the DLNA part, I'm still a bit confused and the main complain I have against synology is that all their apps are not configurable enough (and even what is simple was made hard with their very bad French translation). I basically organize my files such as:

• /Media/Photos
• /Media/Videos
• /Media/Music

But the DLNA server wants me to have at the root of the volume:

• /photo
• /video
• /music

And you can't change this :-/ You can only trick and do links such as explained in this blog. But then byebye the ultimate dream of "I will not have to hack into this box". I could have just move my files there and be good to go but I don't like when things go in my way.

Also I have organized documents classified as above but also unorganized documents that come from BitTorrent that I want to be able to watch through DLNA before classifying them (If I ever do). I had to create a directory /video/incoming and point to the incoming folder of my bittorrent client... So all the unclassified documents, could be photos, videos or music go to /video/Incoming, not intuitive and I get the strange look from my wife if I have to tell her that if she wants to listen to some music, she has to:

• Switch on the TV
• Go the the media player
• Choose Music
• Now browse into Videos ??To listen to my music??
• Then Incoming
• And pick the album

I haven't checked yet that the DLNA server index is properly refreshed when new content is added in /video/incoming.

Torrents

My experience with torrents was to use a "watched folder" where I would just drop my torrent files and they would start to be downloaded immediately. Unfortunately with the set of software provided by Synology this is not possible, you have to 'manually' add them one by one either through an application on Windows (I think there is for Mac as well) or through a web interface. Also the default settings is to stop seeding once a file has been downloaded completely, that's a bad default IMO but can be changed.

And then I am not talking about automatic downloading though RSS or automatic sorting of files based on their names, that's not for now...

So again, I was not expecting something good and I was unfortunately right :-/

Photos

There is one application that I didn't think about using called "Photo Station" basically it takes whatever is in /photo and makes album from it so you can share with the world. Again this is a very basic app, you can't do much with it. It takes the folder structure to create the albums, you can change the name of the album (it defaults to the name of the folder), you can decide if it's public or private (if private, you need an account) but you can't create groups and make some albums visible to only a group of people. (Edit: In fact you can select individuals, and there are more settings that I originally thought, such as virtual albums that display the latests added pictures)

It looks like this.

At the time of writing there is still no preview of the pics, it has been running for 4-5 days and creates a thumbnail out of all the pictures I had (35GB). That's when I wished I had a bigger CPU :)

Conclusion

Overall I don't regret my choice but it could have been better. I wasn't expected anything great on the software end and it didn't impress me. The box is reliable, I didn't had to reboot it.

Someone who has more time may get a better solution with FreeNAS and a small/energy efficient machine, but it has some risks and requires much more time to setup, but then you have more freedom.

For the torrent thing, not sure what to do to make my life easier, will probably have to browse about other people experience and may have to hack the box again, something I wanted to avoid by buying a ready-to-go box.