Synology DS1511+ NAS Review
In this post, I’ll be reviewing a brand new Synology DiskStation DS1511+ NAS equipped with five Hitachi Deskstar 2TB 5K3000 drives configured in RAID5. For comparison, I’ve also written about the Gen 1 Drobo’s performance as a NAS before (it tops out around 20MB/s), and own two of them at home. While the Drobos allow you to build mix-and-match RAID arrays, they are slow, take forever to rebuild, noisy, and hot. I am hoping the DS1511+ will remedy all of these issues.
Read more about the DS1511+ specs here
Network Base Configuration
The Synology NAS is using default MTU of 1500, connected to a Gigabit Ethernet Switch on LAN2. Testing with iperf shows a good gigabit connection between my PC and the NAS of around 885Mb/s:
Big_Bug> iperf -s
————————————————————
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 7] 0.0-20.0 sec 2.05 GBytes 882 Mbits/sec
[ 6] 0.0-30.0 sec 3.09 GBytes 885 Mbits/sec
In megabytes per second, we can transfer 110.625 MB/s. As you will see, this is actually slightly lower than the performance of the RAID array.
The Hard Drives
How fast are the triple-platter 2TB deskstar 5K3000s in RAID5? It can do a very reasonable 125 MB/s in unbuffered pure-disk performance:
Big_Bug> hdparm -t /dev/sda
Timing buffered disk reads: 374 MB in 3.01 seconds = 124.22 MB/sec
Benchmarking File Copy from Windows
To test how fast I can transfer from my PC to the NAS, I’ve created a 4GB binary file:
C:\Users\Elliott Bäck\Desktop>ls -l test.file
-rw-rw-rw- 1 Elliott Bäck 0 4693544330 2011-04-19 20:00 test.file
Copying this file in Windows 7’s explorer took just 50.5 seconds. Doing the math, this gives us an average write rate of 88.63 MB/s. How fast can we copy it back? It took 71.6 seconds, for an average read rate of 62.51 MB/s. Both of these number are going to be constrained by how fast my desktop PC’s Intel SSD can read/write. I also tested using Java and writing a RandomAccessFile with a ByteBuffer, which achieved 95MB/s write and 97MB/s read on a 1GB file.
Reliability & Temperature
You just need to open up the storage manager on the Synology DS1511+ NAS to see what a beauty it is, giving you a full SMART status readout on all your physical drives, as well as their temperatures. Even after running through my benchmarking, the drives were only 34° C warm:
Conclusions
At nearly $900 for the NAS itself without drives, it’s pricey. But plugged into a Gigabit ethernet, the DS1511+ from Synology is also fast, cool, and quiet; the three things you want most from a NAS. Featurewise, it has a glorious UI, media servers built in (which I don’t use) and expandibility from 5 to a maximum of 15 drives. I anticipate phasing out my Drobos, with their proprietary technology, for the Synology NAS, which runs on open-source plain-vanilla linux.
| This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 at 9:45 pm and is tagged with gigabit ethernet switch, hitachi deskstar, gigabit connection, default mtu, transfer bandwidth, raid array, iperf, synology, disk performance, raid5, raid arrays, mbits, rw 1, base configuration, drobo, c users, megabytes, benchmarking, hard drives, interval. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
Hi, may I ask where and how did you install iperf on it? I received mine today and wanted to do some benchmarking too.
Thanks.
You mentioned you were unhappy w/the Drobo’s noise level – how do you find the noise level of the DS1511? I was concerned that with two fans it’d be a bit much.
BTW, which Drobo(s) do you have that you compared the DS to, the USB connected or FS?
I find the DS1511 to be several times quieter than the Drobos–although this may simply be the Hitachi drives, which are cool (33C!) and quiet.
My Drobos are first-gen connected over USB, so take it with a grain of salt…