DS408 review

thiggins · #1 08-22-2008, 08:35 AM

Synology doubles the RAID 5 performance of its quad-bay BYOD NAS /server, but also almost doubles the price. [article link]

rpwoodman · #2 08-23-2008, 12:31 PM

Hi,

A great site - a really good reference point for all sorts of purchases I'm investigating.

Could someone give me an idea as to the timescales for a review of the new Synology DS408 NAS? I was considering the CS407 (which seems to have been replaced by the DS408), the QNap TS409, and (very possibly) the QNap TS509.

What I don't understand is that a lot of the reviews seem to imply that the performance of these boxes is cpu-bound, but if that's the case, I'd have expected the QNap 509 to be considerably faster than (say) the Synology DS508 as the CPU has double the clock speed. Is the Celeron much less efficient than the CPU in the Synology?

It seems to me that the QNap products are better-built, with better features (e.g. RAID migration which I'd really like), but the Synology devices have better support.

Both support forums seem to have tales of woe where people have lost access to their data (tho certainly some of the QNap issues have been fixed by support, but I don't like the thought of losing data, even if it is recoverable, albeit by a support technician).

If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks very much.

rgds

Rupert

thiggins · #3 08-24-2008, 04:28 PM

Review will be mid to late September.

How do the reviews imply that performance is CPU bound? There are many factors that limit performance, CPU is only one.

rpwoodman · #4 08-24-2008, 05:43 PM

Thanks Tim - I'll look forward to reading about it.

Sorry, my choice of wording was obviously not very good. I've read a number of reviews of different NAS boxes on different sites (tho the SmallNetBuilder reviews have become my main point of reference due to their comprehensiveness), and a few have referred to the CPU being a bottleneck (obviously there a some other things which come immediately to mind, and presumably a few which don't).

I've seen a thread on the forums where you discussed with someone that there are a number of things which will impact peformance and you're planning on detailing some of these. Again, I look forward to reading these articles.

But my question still stands - is the CPU in the Synology products more efficient than the Celeron, or is there a lot of extra capacity in the Celeron which in the day-to-day running is unused?

rgds

thiggins · #5 08-24-2008, 05:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rpwoodman

But my question still stands - is the CPU in the Synology products more efficient than the Celeron, or is there a lot of extra capacity in the Celeron which in the day-to-day running is unused?

I have no idea. I suspect, however, that the answer lies more in the code running on the processors than the processors themselves.

vniwaja · #6 10-06-2008, 04:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thiggins

Review will be mid to late September.

Can you give some indication of the direction the review is going?

thiggins · #7 10-06-2008, 09:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vniwaja

Can you give some indication of the direction the review is going?

Review will be short. Feature set is same as other Disk Stations. Focus will mostly be on performance.

ugo1 · #8 10-07-2008, 05:33 PM

Hi

I just read the review of the DS408 because I'm interesting in it but I can't see performance test in raid 1 mode.
A question: my transfer to the DS408 will ammount to 50 GB of data each time with a file size that can reach the 15GB on a raid 1 volume. How much time that can be done?

Regards

Ugo

thiggins · #9 10-08-2008, 08:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ugo1

I just read the review of the DS408 because I'm interesting in it but I can't see performance test in raid 1 mode.

We only test RAID 1 on dual-drive NASes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ugo1

A question: my transfer to the DS408 will amount to 50 GB of data each time with a file size that can reach the 15GB on a raid 1 volume. How much time that can be done?

RAID 1 performance will be somewhere between RAID 0 and 5.
I can't give you an exact number for file transfer time. But if most of the files are large (>1GB, use the throughput # for that point in the Chart, i.e. between 28 and 37 MB/s.