Synology DS212j NAS

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  KLoNe on 04/01/2013 - 13:14

  These devices are AWESOME!
  I HIGHLY recommend them (unless you're a POWER user of course who needs crazy high speed).

  • 

    Bystander on 04/01/2013 - 17:44

    Yep, the reviews I've read are all positive.

    I was going to put 2 drives in and have it set up as RAID 1 but now I'm leaning towards having one internal drive and one external for backup.

    Which drive/s did you put in?

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  zfa on 04/01/2013 - 19:43

  +1

  Obviously we all have different requirements but personally I feel 2bay NAS units have had their day.

  With the speed at which most of us produce data these days coupled with the fact that you want some kind of RAID/redudancy to be secure I just don't see the value in a 2bay unit. Even if you go with 3TB drives initially, say, then that's as big as you're ever going to be able to go before you're looking at a whole new storage solution again (or replacing both your drives and copying data about for hours at the very least). You just can't get past the fact that your size is limited to whatever the biggest drive you can put in it is, assuming you want redundancy.

  If you don't want to go for a dedicated 4bay NAS due to cost then you can get an HP N40L (which all Ozbargainers love…) and buy a licensed pre-installed unRAID USB stick for less than $300 all-in. As you're booting off the internal USB port this gives you a 5 bay NAS (6 if you use the external port and cram the drive in the unit, but that's a bit hacky) for not much more money. unRAID allows your initial drives to be of any size (so use any old drives you have for now if you're on a budget) and expands as you replace your old drives with larger ones. This flexibility coupled with the number of drive spaces in an N40L allows you to go up to 5 x 'whatever size drives' of USABLE space giving great future-proofing.

  Sorry - I know this is off-topic but just throwing out my opinion. YMMV, DYOR etc.

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    Bystander on 05/01/2013 - 06:23

    Thanks, its not off topic to me. Actually I started off looking at the N240L but read some comments from people who owned both the 240 and the 212 and they both said the 212 was a lot easier to setup. And that's what I'm looking for, plug it in change a few settings and leave it.

    • 

      zfa on 05/01/2013 - 11:28

      Well seeing as you're just putting a USB stick in a port on the motherboard (just open the door to do it…) and booting it up into the standard unRAID interface, it should be just as easy to use as a dedicated NAS (maybe have to flip into the BIOS and say boot from USB on first startup).

      Sure, you only get to use the 4 'normal' drive bays unless you bother to flash the replacement BIOS and open up the other ports but even without doing this you've got yourself a pretty much 'out of the box' 4 bay NAS $300, with scope to go up to 6 bays if you want to spend half an hour flashing the BIOS.

      The unRAID interface is pretty easy to use, no harder than most other NAS interfaces I've seen really.