{"id":681,"date":"2014-06-19T19:30:09","date_gmt":"2014-06-19T17:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/?p=681"},"modified":"2015-06-19T09:13:06","modified_gmt":"2015-06-19T07:13:06","slug":"synologys-speed-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/2014\/06\/19\/synologys-speed-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"Synology’s speed lie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since a while I own a new Synology NAS, a DiskStation DS414<\/a>. Synology advertizes this model with speeds of<\/p>\n

\n

Over 207.07MB\/s Reading, 135.63MB\/s Writing<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

However I never came even close to those speeds in my daily use of the DiskStation, so I tried to set up an ideal scenario in which I would get the fastest speed the NAS could deliver.<\/p>\n

I did so by using a very fast client (a MacBook Pro Retina with a 2.5 GHz Core i7 CPU and SSD drive), and connected that directly “back-to-back” (i. e. without any network device in-between that could potentially slow the network traffic down) to one of the networking ports of the NAS.<\/p>\n

The NAS contains three hard drives, a Western Digital WD30EURS (3 TB, max. speed according to benchmarking >130 MByte\/s both reading and writing)<\/span>, a Seagate ST32000542AS (2 TB, max. speed at least 109 MByte\/s)<\/span>, and a Western Digital WD40EFRX<\/span> (4 TB, max. speed 146 MByte\/s), in a SHR compound (technically a form of RAID5, so due to the striping involved speed should increase compared to a single drive configuration).<\/p>\n

I then copied about 25 GB of large files (movies) between the Mac and the NAS.<\/p>\n

The fastest speeds I could get was a meager 79.5 MByte\/s on reads, and 39.4 MByte\/s on writes. That was extremely disappointing, but it confirmed my subjective feeling that the NAS is slow.<\/p>\n

To confirm the read data rates I executed the following command directly on the NAS, to have a means of a “plausibility check:”<\/p>\n

nas1> hdparm -t \/dev\/sda \/dev\/sdb \/dev\/sdc\r\n\r\n\/dev\/sda:\r\n\u00a0Timing buffered disk reads: 328 MB in\u00a0 3.01 seconds = 109.09 MB\/sec\r\n\r\n\/dev\/sdb:\r\n\u00a0Timing buffered disk reads: 332 MB in\u00a0 3.00 seconds = 110.66 MB\/sec\r\n\r\n\/dev\/sdc:\r\n\u00a0Timing buffered disk reads: 392 MB in\u00a0 3.00 seconds = 130.66 MB\/sec<\/pre>\n
This shows that the NAS is<\/em> capable of reading at a higher speed than it could deliver to the client via the network — possibly an issue with the CPU being too weak to deliver the full speed Synology promise?<\/p>\n
Anyway, I find these disappointing results inacceptable, and it makes Synology’s statement a “lie.” Also, I found severe instability and defects with respect to the VideoStation package and recording from a DVB-T stick. Plus the massive issues Synology have with the power-saving “Hibernation” feature that never worked for me (neither on this box, nor on its predecessor DS212+.) And I’m not alone, a lot of people have the same issue, but Synology seem unable to solve it.<\/p>\n
Considering the high price of the NAS (almost 400 EUR!), my strong opinion is that the device simply is not worth its money. It would have been better to buy a HP ProLiant MicroServer<\/a> and get more<\/em> power for less<\/em> money. \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Synology promise more than they can deliver with their DS414.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,133],"tags":[130,131,132],"class_list":["post-681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-storage-computers","tag-nas","tag-storage","tag-synology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":685,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions\/685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bergs.biz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}