Displaying items by tag: Disk Station

As 2013 comes to a close we have a new contest to help you bring in 2014 with your own private cloud. Synology has given us a DS1513+ (diskless) to give to the person that can gather all of the information we will be asking for. The contest will involve a scavenger hunt on DecrytedTech, our YouTube channel and Synology’s product pages. You can also get additional chances to win by liking our Facebook page, Joining and posting in the contest thread on our Forum. With that, here are the questions and good luck!

Storage is one of those things that you never seem to have enough of. Just when you think that 2Terabyte drive is going to last you it seems to get full like magic. I can vividly remember buying a 1.2GB drive and thinking that would last me for a very long time. As you might have guessed it did not and the progression only got faster. It was not long before file sizes were getting larger faster than storage makers could keep up, at least in the consumer world. In the professional world we still had large arrays of disks (RAID) to help maintain capacity and performance. Unfortunately, these arrays also had a limit due to the difficulty in expanding them once you reached their capacity. As storage systems evolved this was remedied by adding in more “trays” of disks. The down side here is that these types of systems are very expensive and out of the reach of many (if not most) small and medium sized businesses.  In this space the NAS (Network Attached Storage) and not the SAN (Storage Area Network) are the most common products and have the same limitations of direct attached storage. So, what do you do when your NAS runs out of space? Synology has an answer for you in the DX513. Follow along with us as we show you just how easy and even cost effective this handy add on to the DS1512+ is.

As the push for cloud based storage and services becomes greater we have been taking a look at the value of these from not only a monetary view, but also from a privacy and security view. To this end we have been tinkering around with a few Network Attached Storage Devices (NAS). One of our first is the Synology DiskStation DS1512+. We have already dissembled the DS1512+ in the first part of our coverage and now have pounded on it for a good length of time to see how it performs using a few synthetic tests as well as real-world usage. So let’s take a look at our results.

When I first got into the IT game the storage needs of even large companies could be maintained in less space than what typically fits on a CD-ROM. In fact all of the applications that we used in the shop fit onto 20 3.25-inch 720KB floppy disks! Now you would be hard pressed to store one or two Word documents on even one of those floppies. Fortunately as our storage requirements have grown so have the devices we keep all that data on. For most home users simply dropping in a 1 or 2 Terabyte hard drive will be enough, but for businesses, prosumers and enthusiasts might need a bit more. For this there are products that can be attached to a normal home or office network that offer extra storage (and many other functions) to meet these needs. Synology is a maker of NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. The idea of the NAS is not new, nor is it a business only product. There have been multiple consumer level NAS devices. The one we have in from Synology is a little outside the normal home environment. This is the Disk Station 1512+ it is a 5-Bay, Dual-Lan, Network Storage device that has some great hardware and software features in store of anyone picking this product up. We will be taking a look at the hardware used inside, the build and some of the basic features in this part of our coverage. So let’s get started.
You can check out the performance half of this review here