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[misty]

I recently purchased a used Synology NAS via eBay - a DS118. This is a simple one drive bay unit which came with a Seagate Ironwolf 6TiB HDD.

I was originally looking into a large capacity external drive as part of my back up solution. Either an external disk or a 3.5" HDD to stick in an old drive caddy. This NAS cost less than a new Seagate Ironwolf 6TiB drive and is so much more fun. Whilst still working as part of my back up plan I will also be running it as a media server and for network storage.

After playing around with it for a few days I am very impressed and now wish I'd got hold of one years ago. It's been surprisingly easy to set up and is very easy to access via a web browser. The operating system is reasonably intuitive and doesn't appear bloated.

It's so good I will probably be retiring my old desktop which has been sitting in a cupboard for the past 10 years running as a headless home server.

I have not been around as long as some forum members, however it still surprises me when I reflect on advances in technology since my first PC - a used Compaq desktop from the late 90's with an AMD K6-2 processor running at 350MHz with 64MB RAM and a huge 6GB HDD!

Comparing the NAS to my first PC I have approximately 1000 times more storage space. The scary thing is I will fill a lot of the 6TiB NAS drive when I move everything I want to back up over to it.

I don't have time at the moment, however look forward to exploring iSCSI target support in the future - assuming it's supported on this model.

I love a used bargain and rarely buy any new equipment these days. It's also nice to have a little project to occupy my time.



misty

[Wonko the Sane]

Only as a data point, in 1995 I bought, for the company I was working for, a couple Compaq desktops to be used on a site office.

They came with Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.1 and the promise to be compatible with the soon to be released Windows 95 (they probably were 486dx4 100 or 133 Mhz and 16 or 32 Mb RAM).

The specs were for a 300 Mb hard disk, but when the machines arrived, although the disks were partitioned into a 300 Mb partition they were actually 500 Mb.

 

So that would have been more than 10000 times, only a few years before.

 

Wonko

[misty]

Note on the Synology NAS. Network speeds have been very poor - now traced back to the cable that came with it. I suspect this is a third party replacement as when I looked more closely I realised that it is CAT5 - this would account for the 10/100 (100Mbps) transfer speeds. 
 
I played around a little and connected the NAS directly to my laptop - a Thinkpad T470s. Networking is not really my area, however I was surprised to learn that it works with both a standard CAT5E cable and a CAT5E crossover cable - I had assumed the crossover cable would be required for a direct connection. 
 
Speeds was significantly faster with the CAT5E cable and the NAS is reporting a 1000Mbps connection - but only after a reboot. Before the reboot is was reporting Network Status: as 100 Mbps, Full duplex, MTU 1500 despite the change of cable.
 
Actual speeds copying from a USB 3.0 external drive connected to my laptop, to a network share on the NAS were between 6348.930 to 6632.216 MegaBytes/min - speeds as reported by RoboCopy following 8 different backups of varying sizes.
 
Not too shabby. And Emby media server appears to be running well and is a nice alternative to Plex. 
 
Still not played around with the iSCSI capabilities as yet and will probably not get around to this for a while.
 

 
misty

[Wonko the Sane]

JFYI, nowadays most interfaces - 10/100 - are auto mdi-x:

https://en.wikipedia...ndent_interface

 

so the need for crossover cable is mostly over.

 

If the connection is 1000, then there is definitely no need for crossover cable (though they will work just fine).

 

It is one of the things the good network hardware engineers did right (don't get me started about the PoE mess).

 

Wonko