Synology's DSM 5 is out

[Eug]

DiskStation Manager 5 from Synology is now out.

http://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/index

The reason I mention this is because it's a brand new GUI (and many under the hood changes too). I haven't installed it yet myself though.

 

[Eug]

A friend says it breaks compatibility with some of his external hard drives. Ouch.

 

[imagoon]

I have some these as backup targets so I planned to wait a few weeks personally. Also seems oddly hard to find a "what's new" section that shows more than marketing images.

 

[Eug]

I installed it both on my primary DS413 and my DS211j which I use as a backup NAS for the DS413. Works fine on both. My external SATA drive also works fine. (My friend who has having problems had a ton of drives hooked up to it, but only three of them are recognized.)

I'm tempted to activate QuickConnect so that I can have access to it anywhere in the world, but I'm a little hesitant as I don't know how safe it is. It doesn't open any ports, but there is a relay server that tells the NAS to initiate a transmission to me (and most routers don't block outgoing traffic unless specifically configured to do so), or something like that.

Anyone have any comments on the security of QuickConnect?

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Just upgraded my DS413j. I only use it as a backup device currently but was planning on eventually carving it up and using it for other purposes as well. I'm curious how well some of these apps will work on it.

 

[Eug]

The 413j has a 1.6 GHz ARM CPU and 512 MB RAM.

It should likely run fine even with the extra apps/services in the background, unless you're taxing the drives hard, esp. with RAID.

I actually keep my NASes with individual drives. Not JBOD, but just individual drives. It keeps the performance fast, and it's actually easier to administer.

 

[imagoon]

I only use the RP812+ as a pure block target. The notes about DSM "600% improved random iSCSI IO" line in there has me mildly interested. The unit is a target for Veeam backups that are deduped via 2012 so it sees a large amount of random IO.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

The 413j has a 1.6 GHz ARM CPU and 512 MB RAM.

It should likely run fine even with the extra apps/services in the background, unless you're taxing the drives hard, esp. with RAID.

I actually keep my NASes with individual drives. Not JBOD, but just individual drives. It keeps the performance fast, and it's actually easier to administer.

I've got it configured with four 4 TB drives in RAID5 now, configured as one large volume for backups for my main server. At some point, I'll likely reconfigure the drives and only use a chunk for backups and the rest as iSCSI targets for other boxes or something of that nature.

 

[Eug]

It seems a lot of people are looking at iSCSI for the home these days.

Can multiple computers target a single iSCSI drive over the network? I'm just curious, but I wouldn't likely be using it anyway, since I sometimes access the same volumes from streaming devices (eg. WD TV Live SMP) as I do from my computers.

 

[kevnich2]

No, ISCSI is a block level storage mechanism. If you try and access the same shared iscsi LUN, it likely will corrupt it. The exception being if you use something like vmware or another clustering technology as these are meant to share a single ISCSI LUN amongst several other devices.

The main thing I use ISCSI for is 1 - my vmware test lab and 2 - my home windows server vm connects it's drive to my nas via ISCSI. The server sees it as a local share but the iscsi back end gives added benefit of adding more disk space if I need it later on very easily.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

It seems a lot of people are looking at iSCSI for the home these days.

Can multiple computers target a single iSCSI drive over the network? I'm just curious, but I wouldn't likely be using it anyway, since I sometimes access the same volumes from streaming devices (eg. WD TV Live SMP) as I do from my computers.

Yes, there is an option to make targets available to multiple PCs. Not sure you could use iSCSI for WD TV Live, though.

Currently I have the NAS volume connected via iSCSI as just another volume on my main server and backups dump to it. It works very well.