Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (NAS) DS214

Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (NAS) DS214..

GET Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (NAS) DS214 By Synology

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78 of 82 people found the following review helpful.
A small and mighty NAS
By Scott
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2AYAEMI103S6I The Synology DS214 is the latest updated version of its mid-range home/soho 2-bay NAS.

The unit itself is pretty barebones and doesn't have that solid quality feel that I prefer in most products given it's thin metal case and plastic build, but it's functional and gets the job done as a NAS case that's not going to be moved around once setup.

The plastic drive trays are a tool less design, just pop the sides off, drop your hard drive in, and pop the sides back on to secure the drive in place.

As with all the home or small office NAS units this only features a single Gigabit ethernet port, however in those installations you wouldn't have the higher end networking switches capable of supporting dual Gigabit nics anyway.

The USB ports are handy for when attaching a UPS backup in order to have the NAS shutdown in the event of a power outage, but I would never recommend using them for USB Drive backup of the NAS - that entirely missing the point of purchasing a NAS unless you intend to transfer the USB drive to another safe location for disaster recovery.

The CPU is a modest dual core, and ram is somewhat limited at 512mb, making this a serviceable NAS for very limited applications running on it and light file server duty. If you're intending to run a significant number of apps and services on the NAS you should consider upgrading the ram or purchasing a larger Synology NAS with a better CPU and Ram support (1-3Gb is often enough for most uses).

Management of the NAS is stellar, the Synology DSM is a great example of what all consumer hardware like this should have, a simple straightforward GUI that cuts out all the complexity of a complicated device allowing home and office users the ability to manage it without ongoing tech support.

The free applications available for the Synology DSM are really what makes their product line shine. Simply clicking on install on one of their apps turns your NAS into anything from the typical file server to a music server, media server (Movies, Pictures), home security camera video storage, VPN server, tons of other business related apps, and many 3rd party community ports from popular Linux apps. You really need to just check out their full App listing to see how easily you can turn these units into an efficient always on server for your home or small business.

Being a 2-bay NAS, if you're not familiar with RAID 1, please keep in mind that you will only have slightly less than half the storage total of the 2 drives you install if you want the ability to not lose data in the event of a single drive failure. If you're not concerned about redundancy with the disks, then your entire capacity will be available to you for storage but is not recommended given the risk of disk failure in the first year of ownership.

If you're serious about capacity, redundancy, performance, and the most bang for your buck I highly recommend considering Synology's larger 4-8 drive NAS units. By going with a larger NAS using multiple hard drives you can purchase multiple less expensive hard drives that will increase your overall performance and redundancy in case of a disk failure. A 2-bay NAS such as this in Raid 1 means you're wasting half your space for redundancy, where a larger NAS would typically only use 20-25% of your capacity for redundancy.

With that said if you feel the DS214 will fit your needs and budget it's definitely a great little unit for the money.

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Great NAS - easy to install, very good NAS performance
By MarkABee
I have a lot of NAS's. I have a Synology 1513+, QNAP 2 Bay, DROBO 5N and have had a number of HP Windows Home Servers and I have some of the single drive Seagate and Western Digital boxes as well.

The DS214 is in a different class than the Seagate/WD boxes. No comparison. If you are new to NAS, you probably are not aware that the CPU/Memory of the NAS box has a lot to do with its performance. How fast does it copy files? How fast does it serve them up? How fast does your DLNA server index and serve up music, etc. Faster better CPU's mean snappier performance. This box is fast - almost as fast as my Synology 1511+. In transferring some test photo files (average size 28M) files, I got 80-90 MB/second across a wired 1TB network. That's very good. Some consumer class devices (other 1 and 2 bay devices) get about 20-30 MB/second so the DS214 is definitely in a different class.

I have stored about 2TB of music and I am using it as a music server. Did I mention that it is fast? It was extremely simple to configure as a DNLA server and as an iTunes server.

One of the big advantages of Synology is their DSM software which you use to configure that NAS. It has a very nice graphical interface that makes it friendly to use. And, there is an application download platform that allows you to download additional software. Management software differs by manufacturer. I like Synology's.

The DS214 is expensive but I feel it is worthwhile. When you move lots of files into a NAS, you want to retain the snappy performance you might have from a local hard disk. So, faster is better. Most people that buy a NAS have a lot of data and store music, videos and photos. If you ever need to transfer over a lot of data (1TB or more) you know that it can take 4-12 hours across the network. I have owned several Synology NAS's and I think they are high performance, easy to use, but you pay a little premium. Over the long term, the premium is more than made up for by better performance and ease of use.

I will buy another Synology again next time.

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
Sleek and nice
By Jonville Joseph
Works great. This product looks sleek, is silent, and considering the price reduction compared to previous years model, it's definitely a great deal for anyone looking for a personal home NAS (2 bays may be a bit small for company use). Plus, the built quality is great and feels robust. I bought this NAS with 2x3TO WD RED.

The nicest thing is without a doubt the NAS operating system. Synology DSM is undoubtedly the most well done GUI you'll find on a NAS.

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WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX

WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX..

Special Price WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX By Western Digital

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1001 of 1090 people found the following review helpful.
Regular consumer drives in RAID are accident waiting to happen
By Gary E. Peterson
Here is a quote from a review at pcper.com

I'm going to let the cat out of the bag right here and now. Everyone's home RAID is likely an accident waiting to happen. If you're using regular consumer drives in a large array, there are some very simple (and likely) scenarios that can cause it to completely fail. I'm guilty of operating under this same false hope - I have an 8-drive array of 3TB WD Caviar Greens in a RAID-5. For those uninitiated, RAID-5 is where one drive worth of capacity is volunteered for use as parity data, which is distributed amongst all drives in the array. This trick allows for no data loss in the case where a single drive fails. The RAID controller can simply figure out the missing data by running the extra parity through the same formula that created it. This is called redundancy, but I propose that it's not.

Since I'm also guilty here with my huge array of Caviar Greens, let me also say that every few weeks I have a batch job that reads *all* data from that array. Why on earth would I need to occasionally and repeatedly read 21TB of data from something that should already be super reliable? Here's the failure scenario for what might happen to me if I didn't:
* Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has a bad sector that cropped up a few months back. This has gone unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file.
* During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector.
* Since drive 1 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector.
* The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 1 and marks it offline.
* Array is now in degraded status with drive 1 marked as failed.
* User replaces drive 1. RAID controller initiates rebuild using parity data from the other drives.
* During rebuild, RAID controller encounters the bad sector on drive 3.
* Since drive 3 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector.
* The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 3 and marks it offline.
* Rebuild fails.

At this point the way forward varies from controller to controller, but the long and short of it is that the data is at extreme risk of loss. There are ways to get it all back (most likely without that one bad sector on drive 3), but none of them are particularly easy. Now you may be asking yourself how enterprises run huge RAIDs and don't see this sort of problem? The answer is Time Limited Error Recovery - where the hard drive assumes it is part of an array, assumes there is redundancy, and is not afraid to quickly tell the host controller that it just can't complete the current I/O request.

Here's how that scenario would have played out if the drives implemented some form of TLER:
* Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has developed a bad sector several weeks ago. This went unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file.
* During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector.
* Drive 1 makes a few read attempts and then reports a CRC error to the RAID controller.
* The RAID controller maps out the bad sector, locating it elsewhere on the drive. The missing sector is rebuilt using parity data from the other drives in the array.
*Array continues normal operation, with the error added to its event log.

The above scenario is what would play out with an Areca RAID controller (I've verified this personally). Other controllers may behave differently. A controller unable to do a bad sector remap might have just marked drive 1 as bad, but the key is that the rebuild would be much less likely to fail as drive 3 would not drop completely offline once the controller ran into the additional bad sector. The moral of this story is that typical consumer grade drives have data error timeouts that are far longer than the drive offline timeout of typical RAID controllers, and without some form of TLER, two bad sectors (totaling 1024 bytes) is all that's required to put multiple terabytes of data in grave danger.

The Solution:
The solution should be simple - just get some drives with TLER. The problem is that until now those were prohibitively expensive. Enterprise drives have all sorts of added features like accelerometers and pressure sensors to compensate for sliding in and out of a server rack while operating, as well as dealing with rapid pressure changes that take place when the server room door opens and the forced air circulation takes a quick detour. Those features just aren't needed in that home NAS sitting on your bookshelf. What *is* needed is a WD Caviar Green that has TLER, and Western Digital delivers that in their new Red drives.

End quote and back to reviewer.
I've got 5 of these in a Synology DiskStation 5-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (DS1512+). It is really a sweet setup.

The Synology software has a S.M.A.R.T. test that can do surface scans to detect bad sectors. I have their Quick Test check every disk daily and the Extended Test set to automatically run on each of the 5 disks every weekend. (The Extended Test takes about 5 hours per disk so I separate the tests by 12 hours.)

96 of 104 people found the following review helpful.
Nice hard drives for NAS or storage server with RAID.
By T. Mccleary
If you're looking at this review, you're probably in the market for some honkin' big drives to stuff into a server or a NAS box. These Western Digital "Red" series drives are probably a total waste of money if you're planning to put them into a regular PC. If you're not doing a raid array of some kind, then save your money and buy the green or black series drives instead. If you're looking to set up a raid array of some sort, these are a bargain. They aren't the fastest drives, but they are rated to run 24x7 serving up data! Their 3 year warranty is above the current industry standard for consumer hard drives.

For my home-made FreeNAS (google it!) NAS/Server, I bought 5 WD Red drives from Adorama (purchased through Amazon) and 1 drive directly from Amazon.

The one drive from Amazon came very well packaged, double boxed in what looks like a WD cardboard box with a shock absorbing cradle. Very well packaged for shipment. Honestly, Amazon has been stellar for packaging boxes for shipment.

The 5 hard drives from Adorama came in a big box which 'clunked' when it was tilted. Opening the box revealed some big plastic pillow air strips, and 5 loose smaller boxes. Inside each of the smaller boxes was a few pillows and a factory bagged hard drive. There were not enough pillows in each box to securely cushion the hard drives against rattling around, so there's a high likelihood of damage in shipment. BAD SHIPPERS! NO DONUT!

Anyway, getting on to the performance of the drives... I'm running 6 drives in a ZFS RaidZ2 array. They are all controlled using an IBM M1015 PCIE 8x SATA 3 controller which has been flashed to be an HBA providing JBOD to the ZFS OS. That's a lotta acronyms! The speed of the array is quite fast... more than fast enough to saturate a gigabit network. I currently have about 5TB of data stored on the 10TB array.

On to the bad stuff...
One of the drives (I haven't checked the serial number to see which shipper it came from) is starting to give signs of premature failure after about 70 hours of operation. During a scrub of the data pool, drive DA5 is experiencing unreadable sectors. Luckily ZFS is able to calculate the correct values for the corrupted data, and is busily recreating the data onto another part of the drive. ZFS rocks for data reliability! If the drive does turn out to be bad, I have a WD Green 3TB drive that I can put into the array as a hot swap temporarily until the failed drive can be replaced. *UPDATE* The ZFS scrub just finished, and it repaired 1.53MB of data, with no data loss. Did I mention that ZFS rocks?

Warning/Advice about Data Storage:
Note 1: If you're going to be using these drives, or any data storage device for that matter, make sure that you take into account that these are highly fragile and delicate devices which can be easily damaged in shipment, or just plain up and fail when you least expect it. You really need to use some sort of redundant array of drives so that if one drive fails, your data doesn't vanish. In my case, the final configuration is going to be 6 drives in a RaidZ2 (dual parity striping), which means that my data stays intact and accessible even if 2 drives fail simultaneously. Also, there is going to be a 3TB Green drive as a hot spare that can take over for any failed drive in the array. With the hot-spare, my data can survive the loss of 3 drives without losing data (as long as the failures don't happen all at the same time).
Note 2: Always, always, always have a backup. In my case, I have two external 3TB USB3.0 drives which will be used only for backup purposes. Every so often, I'll backup the critical data onto the drives and stash them in my locker at work. If you don't have TrueCrypt, google it and see why your backup removable drives should be using it. If someone steals the drives, they only get the drives and not my data.

I'm giving 5 stars for the drives that work... 1 star for the failing drive... averages to about 4 stars score! I'll update this review once I have details on how the drives do in a week or so. Currently it ain't looking too good for drive DA5!

139 of 160 people found the following review helpful.
NAS Best Friend
By Simon
After about six months of searching for the perfect drive, I finally settled on two of these Western Digital Red 2TB WD20EFRX hard drives. I was ready to purchase HGST enterprise drives, the former Hitachi, but WD came out with these drives just in-time. I wanted to get the 3TB WD30EFRX version for my Synology DS212 NAS, but the price difference didn't make that much of a sense, and 2TB drives are more than enough for a few years of my home office use. I am very happy that these drives MTBFs are rated at 1,000,000 hours, they use less power, and they are cheaper than other enterprise drives.

Upon receiving, I immediately installed them in my NAS. It took about 15 minutes to install DSM 4 and begin the inspection process. I neither chose Raid 1, JBOD, or SHR, and I took some online advice and created two separate volumes, one on each disk, to have two independent file systems. In this case, you don't have to worry about rebuilding disk arrays if any drives fail, and you always have a backup present. I was planning on using Folder Sync feature to sync all folders from Disk 1 to Disk 2 every other hour, but I found out this feature only works on two independent Synology Disk Stations; however, you can use automated backup feature to backup data from Disk 1 into Disk 2, and it produces about the same result as Folder Sync does, and it gives you a few more options for backing up system and application files as well.

Synology volume creation took about 7 hours for each drive with automatic bad sector reallocation feature. I later tested each drive with S.M.A.R.T extended test--each took about 4 hours--and I am happy to report that I did not have any bad sectors on either of the drives. That is, the "Reallocated Sector Count" reads zero in S.M.A.R.T report.

The drives are surprisingly quiet. I had an enterprise RE2 500GB in my NAS, and it was thunderstorm loud compared to these. The temperature is also very reasonable. When the drive is resting it is about 31C/88F, and under heavy usage it rises up to 35C/95F. Although these drives speed are only 5000 rpm, I don't see any difference in file transfer speed. The only downside that I could sense was the startup time from sleep. I feel that compared to my old WD RE2 drive, it takes a good 2 to 5 seconds more for the NAS to come out of sleep each time. Not a deal breaker, but something to consider when you invest in these drives.

I think WD has done a good job with these drives, and they are currently the best on the market for home or home office use. That being said, I still think WD RE4 drives are the best enterprise drives and ultimate in performance; however, if you are looking for a good set of drives for your NAS, and the power consumption and noise are important to you, these WD Red drives will work just fine. Compared to desktop drives, these come with a few enterprise features that come in handy and will save you some time and money down the road.

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HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive Kit (0S03664)

HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive Kit (0S03664)..

GET HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 4TB 7200RPM SATA III 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive Kit (0S03664) By HGST

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Works well enough
By Kyle Cronin
I bought four of these drives and put them into a Promise Pegasus2 R4 with RAID 5. With this setup I benchmark about 470 MB/s write and 360 MB/s read with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. These speeds are well in excess of the speeds you will be able to achieve with a NAS, the marketed purpose for the drives. Only time will tell whether these drives will be reliable, but with none DOA they're off to a good start.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Longest MBTF I could find
By Gadget Freak
Just what I was looking for, reliability. Obviously a 3-year warranty is a good indicator. The Deskstar NAS is a new product. It has the 1M MTBF vs. the regular Deskstar 7k4000 (HDS724040ALE640) which has a 0.8M MTBF. The NAS version also has a rotational stability sensor to help monitor the smart status better. I was looking for additional external storage for backups & videos. I installed 4 of these in an 4-bay external USB 3.0 enclosure (Dyconn Quartz 4). For around $1100 total installed cost, you can get nice 16Tb setup for all your "stuff". I've got mine connected to a MacMini. A good (non-SSD) 3.5" drive has about the same read/write speed as USB 3.0, thus in an external USB 3.0 setup, it will give you ~170-180 MB/s regardless of RAID setup.

Update #1
I was able to test drive speed vs various other drives. This drive performs as expected. I did not test in a RAID configuration. (sorry about the formatting, the last two nos. in each row are Read/Write in MB/s), all tests with BlackMagic

Mid--2011 Mac Mini
WD My Book Studio 4Tb, RAID 0 Firewire 800 800 megabit FW800 60 64
Apple 5400 rpm 750 Gb HD SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 68 68
Toshiba/Apple 5400 500 Gb Laptop drive SATA III 3 gigabit Thunderbolt 63 63
Crucial M4 - 256 Gb SATA III 5 gigabit Thunderbolt 382 79
HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit Thunderbolt 163 160 (Seagate BackupPlus thunderbolt adapter)

2012 Mac Mini Server
Samsung 840 SSD - 500 Gb SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 560 320
Samsung 840 SSD - 500 Gb x 2 - RAID 0 SATA III 6 gigabit SATA III 990 620
Patriot Magnum 64 Gb USB 3.0 Memory Stick USB 3.0 4.8 gigabit USB 3.0 242 120
Transcend 64 Gb USB 3.0 ?? Memory Stick USB 3.0 4.8 gigabit USB 3.0 15 15
HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit USB 3.0 131 126 (Dyconn Quartz 4, JOBD)
HGST 4 Tb NAS 3.5" Drive SATA III 6 gigabit USB 3.0 163 160 (Anker Uspeed adapter)

Update #2; I just tested four of these drives in RAID5 mode on the 4-bay USB 3.0 Dyconn.... way better than expected 250 Mb/s Read, 241 Write. Woo Hoo! So, double the single drive mode.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
This thing is FAST
By Jeff Welch
Other than using an SSD, this is by far the fastest drive I have ever had, that said I purchased it for its size and reliability. Size is great, speed is awesome. The jury is out on reliability for me, maybe I'll revise this in two years!.

I like to retire my drives after a couple of years to head off reliability problems before they happen. I am in the process of using this drive to replace two 2TB drives from another manufacturer. I lost a drive on a laptop a few years ago and ever since I have become very paranoid about loosing my data (basically everything that I have made for close to 20 years, plus many movies, songs and pictures, I delete NOTHING).

If you have read a lot of Hard Drive reviews, you are probably more worried about which drive to pick now then when you started. After several weeks of research and reading, HGST seemed to me to be the best choice. Time will tell.

Assuming this drive works well over the next few months, I will purchase a second one and mirror them for data backup.

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