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Data Storage

Synology Launches DiskStation DS1520+ (betanews.com) 55

Synology today added a new NAS to its lineup: "DiskStation DS1520+," with five bays. It also has two NVMe PCIe SSD slots for cache. From a report: "Featuring the Intel Celeron Processor J4125, DS1520+ provides a performance boost that sees a 126 percent increase in website responsiveness and a 19.8 percent increase in compute-tasks. The DS1520+ provides dual M.2 2280 NVMe SSD cache slots, along with four 1GbE network ports. DS1520+ comes equipped with five bays that support HDDs and SSDs of up to 16TB. If the need for storage grows, users can expand their DS1520+ using Synology expansion units (purchased separately), giving users a maximum raw capacity of 240TB," says Synology. It's priced at $700, but BetaNews, which has listed the full specs and other details, says Amazon is already selling it at $650.
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Synology Launches DiskStation DS1520+

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  • I paid a whopping 250 bucks for a PC NAS which allows for 4x internal HDDs, 2x nVME drives, plus enough USB 3.0 ports for 6 more external HDDs.
    Since I am a lazy bum I installed Windows 10 x64 on it, PLEX and torrent clients, Teamviewer, etc.

    I see a market for the Synology drive, but for what I need (lots of storage) I got a way better deal this way.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday August 21, 2020 @09:56AM (#60426573)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I'm not sure how many VMs I'd want to run on a Celeron chip, but okay.

        • You could do quite a few if the cpu load is low. At that point you're limited by ram.

        • by dissy ( 172727 )

          It's not the hardware insomuch as their DSM (OS) platform. Have you not checked out the apps available to download and setup? For the x86 CPU models, you can run some VMs under it.

          I'm not sure how many VMs I'd want to run on a Celeron chip, but okay.

          Why Celeron? Is that considered an x86 chip?
          I read parent posters meaning as a full blown normal chip, so maybe it's just a misunderstanding there.

          My Synology rack station RS3617xs has a 6-core Xeon chip in it, and 64 GB of ram.
          It can most certainly run some VMs in it, and probably more VMs than one really should be running directly on a storage server system.

          My older DS918+ however has a 4-core Celeron in it, and ever since I pulled it from the cluster it was purchased for it's become my main docker host.

      • The DSM platform is bloatware. I have one of their older NAS devices and it worked pretty well when it was new, even serving up iSCSI volumes at gigabit wirespeed. But over the past few year the DSM updates slowed it down so much it's basically useless for anything except slow bulk storage backups now. Whenever I have to log into the admin interface to do anything now I have to have a todo list of things I can go do while I wait for the screens to load. This is ridiculous! Why should the admin interfac
      • I think the thing with 2 bays and more RAM and CPU cores is a barebones mini PC.
      • One word: XPenology.
        https://xpenology.org/ [xpenology.org]

    • I am actually more surprised that they are selling Consumer NAS. Being that most services are so big into "Cloud" Nonsense.

      The big reason why I don't get one of these, is the fact that I have a slew of different devices that may not properly backup the way I want them to.

      • You can download Xpenology on any old x86 to try out the platform. Active Backup works really well for PC backup, it supports Time Machine well for Mac, and I use Hyper Backup to back up the whole thing to Wasabi storage. I also have my Proxmox server backing up to it over NFS.

      • I am actually more surprised that they are selling Consumer NAS. Being that most services are so big into "Cloud" Nonsense.

        Synology sells to high-end consumers with special mass-storage needs, like photographers. I have installed some of them for my IT customers.

      • "I am actually more surprised that they are selling Consumer NAS. Being that most services are so big into "Cloud" Nonsense."

        4K Porn Collections.

    • If you're just a little tech savvy, you can do something similar to this article for a lot less than they're charging, especially considering that doesn't include any drives.

      I had a homegrown NAS for a long time, but when it came to upgrading I finally got tired of dealing with it and bought a four bay ZyXel unit. While I regret not being able to truly upgrade the software beyond what the manufacturer allows, it is definitely lower-stress configuration wise.

    • by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Friday August 21, 2020 @10:05AM (#60426601) Homepage

      I had that. I went to Synology. I don't have the time anymore to manage it myself. Email alerts when I'm low on space or need to add a drive and I barely had to do anything to set that up. Any feature imaginable is ready to go - Time Machine backup, NFS, SMB, user management, AD integration, etc. Rather than USB 3.0 ports, they have eSATA for a whole expansion unit of drive bays.

      I have a Torrent client and Plex running on it - only a couple clicks to install.

      Go download Xpenology if you want to try it out - this will let you try out the platform on any old x86 PC, but is a bit buggy for full-time use.

      • Makes sense. Depends what you use it for.
        I originally had a DS216j which was almost good, but lacked in certain areas:
        - Transmission never exceeded 30 MB/s throughput, no matter what, on a Gigabit Fiber connection. The homemade NAS hovers around 95-105 MB/s constantly for a fully available torrent. Two reasons for that: it CAN download at high speeds and I am using a 250GB nVME Drive as temporary download storage, after torrent finishes it is moved to a HDD.
        - Low processing power. Any movie r TV series 720p

        • The only good Synology units have the Celeron J-series or better. The DS216j is a Marvell chip. They honestly shouldn't even sell those because it hurts their brand.

    • by DogDude ( 805747 )
      I paid $100 for a refurbished PC that is my NAS. So, there!
  • Nah, you're right, msmash, we don't.

    Stick your slashverts where they belong.

  • by dark.nebulae ( 3950923 ) on Friday August 21, 2020 @10:06AM (#60426603)

    I have a DS918+ and a DX517 expansion bay. I love the thing.

    With 9 8gb Seagate IronWolf drives in a full-on RAID capacity, I have about 56TB of storage space.

    Sure the shell might be more than some other types of NAS platforms, but this thing is basically maintenance-free. I didn't have to install windows or anything on it, Synology's OS (linux based) works just fine and supports self-updating.

    I have nightly tasks which back up key data off the NAS to an external USB drive for extra protection and usage reports which monitor FS growth and looks for irregularities. I get monthly health and security reports emailed to my inbox. I can remote into the NAS from outside of my network, I can access or upload files from anywhere in the world, I get integrated mobile apps on my phone for accessing and using my device, plus a suite of private cloud apps that I can use anywhere but my data remains in-house.

    So yes, you might argue that the $700 is too much to pay for just a NAS, but I would counter that for $700 you get so much more than just a NAS.

    • I've got a DS1512+, and it's been a rock-solid workhorse for me. I pretty much just use it for network storage, local computer backups (I've got four of them), plus a media server for ripped DVDs and BluRays. I perform a weekly backup from the Synology to an Amazon S3 bucket as well, which costs very little, since it's mostly documents and source code. When a disk inevitably fails (I've replaced several so far), you just pop in a new one, go to the control panel, and add it to the disk pool. You don't e

  • I use an old PC I paid maybe $100 for. I just use Windows for super simple local file sharing and FTP for remote access. It's cheap, simple, and super flexible. I've got 4 drives in it right now, and every so often I plug in a few drives via USB for backups which I do with a single robocopy command. Done.
  • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday August 21, 2020 @10:27AM (#60426689) Journal
    Given contemporary disk sizes, 5 bays can be a pretty significant chunk of storage; and with a couple of NVMe cache/accelerator devices fairly speedy as well.

    That makes 4xGBe, without even a single PCIe expansion option, seem like a really limiting choice. Especially with 10GbE over copper increasingly common you don't even need to mess around with SFP cages for short runs.

    I assume that there is some BoM thing, or a cynical product line segmentation concern; but it's weird to see that they added two ports for expansion shelves; but not even 1 10GbE NIC or PCIe slot for NIC expansion.

    There's certainly a place for cheap NAS; but, especially given contemporary HDD sizes, 5 bays+ expansion shelf support indicates moderately serious storage ambitions, not someone shopping for minimum-viable-NAS; and such people are increasingly likely to have multiple clients and/or clients capable of greater than 1GbE.

    Anyone know if there's an SKU further up the price sheet that is being protected; or if the Celeron this thing is based on mysteriously triples in tray price if you pair it with a decent NIC or something?
    • by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Friday August 21, 2020 @10:55AM (#60426793) Homepage

      but it's weird to see that they added two ports for expansion shelves; but not even 1 10GbE NIC or PCIe slot for NIC expansion.

      The model is just not high end enough. They do have models with 10GbE built-in on the way. The multiple 1Gb is just more practical for cheaper setups. You can still do link aggregation and it doesn't require a 10GbE switch to do it, just more ports - which is great right now if most of your devices are only 1Gb each. And I've had lightning take out a single LAN port for a client and they could just treat it as redundant ports.

      There is a 10GbE PCIe card available for some of their other models.

      • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        You can still do link aggregation and it doesn't require a 10GbE switch to do it, just more ports

        And a switch that supports it, otherwise instead of a virtual 4GbE link it's just 4 individual 1GbE links.

      • True link aggregation requires SMB 3.0 multichannel if you are using it for a Windows NAS. It's still experimental and not recommended.

    • The lack of 10GbE on these class of Synology products is what has kept me from snapping one up. I have a fair amount of video and photos I like to mess about with, and an NAS with several drive bays would be a great fit for storing it. I even popped for the $100 10GbE option on my Mac Mini with an eye toward directly cabling it to a NAS, despite zero other 10GbE infrastructure.

      But Synology has been dragging their feet on this, and so I've been sorely tempted by QNAP many times. But Synology's UI and soft

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Given contemporary disk sizes, 5 bays can be a pretty significant chunk of storag

      Not as much when you realize you're going to need RAID6 or better, even RAID5 is useless because loss of a one disk can result in multi-day restore operations.

      So you'd want two parity drives, and likely you want a warm spare so on loss of one of the drives it will rebuild immediately. This reduces your disk pool to 2 data disks, which at 15TB for the largest drives on the market, is still a slot, but may not be enough.

      I assume

  • Here's the real deal:
    https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS1520+ [synology.com]

  • Why bother with single point of failure and artificial scaling limits when you can just buy hard drives and plug them into your network?

    • by Scutter ( 18425 )

      If all you're looking for is cheap-and-deep storage, then this isn't the product for you. The target market for Synology is pseudo-servers for small- and branch-offices that need server applications like backups, LDAP, e-mail, etc. and don't want to buy commodity servers, and don't have the manpower or expertise to roll their own using available hardware and some flavor of linux.

      • If all you're looking for is cheap-and-deep storage, then this isn't the product for you. The target market for Synology is pseudo-servers for small- and branch-offices that need server applications like backups, LDAP, e-mail, etc. and don't want to buy commodity servers

        These low end NAS are file servers first and foremost with matching specs. Low performance processors, typically ARM chips or atom x86 with minimal non-ECC RAM. If the target market was application servers these things would have different specs.

  • by mschaffer ( 97223 ) on Friday August 21, 2020 @11:37AM (#60426983)

    This is a fucking advertisement.

  • Why canâ(TM)t Apple make their Mac an EZ home server that is the central node for a personal cloud? I want all of my files hosted on iCloud - thatâ(TM)s fine and helpful - but I also want files locally spread across some shared storage aggregate to all of my Apple devices and storage plugged in via USB. Personal, secure and easy cloud. Dunno why Apple canâ(TM)t champion something like this. All of the pieces are there. Furthermore, I want my compute distributed across my home. Apple will be i
  • I like Synology products, but this is just a baby version of a product that has been out for years; why is it appropriate for a slashvertisement?

    I really wish Synology would do a 5-bay nvme NAS, maybe with space for one hard drive for cheap redundancy (or maybe not). QNAP has had a few different all-ssd solutions out there for several years, and while they run hot it is perfect for home in terms of form factor and storage.

    I ended up going for NextCloud though, which is just a Pi4 with external ssd enclosur

  • I see a whole lot of people saying they really like these units. But I gotta tell you, I'm not on board.

    At my last workplace, they slowly decided to standardize on Synology NAS boxes to replace the need for a Windows server. Granted, that saved a bit of electricity (though in many of our leased offices, the electric bill was covered by the building owner anyway). But I found it a really limiting move. For starters? In some of our locations, we'd regularly encounter weird file/folder permissions issues tha

  • The x20 Synology NAS family ( including the DS1520+ ) is using the nex Intel J4xxx CPUs - labeled as the "Geminilake" architecture in Synology's software build environment.

    Problem is: There's no software build environment for Geminilake - so if you want/need to build your own software packages - you're out of luck

    The last-year's x19 models ( ex: DS1019+ ) for which you have everything ( Apollolake ) are no longer available for sale.

    The new Geminilake architecture is missing from the official repositories re

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