Peenie Wallie: Synology DiskStation DS413 Installation

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February 9, 2013

Synology DiskStation DS413 Installation

I ordered a 12 Terabyte Network Addressable Storage unit so that I'd have more local storage for my photos. (It will store roughly 2 million 4 megabyte photos).

So far, the setup has been pretty easy. Pulled out the four bays, dropped a 3 Terabyte drive into each bay. Put in four screws to mount each drive into the drive caddie. Slid in the drive caddies into the drive bays. (Note the "Up" arrow at the front. Hard to see. Nearly invisible. But it's there.)

The drives that came with it are 3 TB 3.5" SATA Western Digital WD Green WDBAAY0030-NRSN drives. They show up in the Snyology DiskStation configuration application as WD30EZRX-00DC0B0.

Then plugged it into the network. Gave it some juice. Booted right up. Four disk green lights on the front are all solid. Status light is flashing yellow. Blue power light is on.

Now, launched Google Chrome and put in http://find.synology.com.

Sweet. It goes out and discovers where the drive is. Shows you the TCP/IP address. Sweet.

Model, IP Address, MAC Address, and Status. Nice.

Says it's going to wipe the drives. Hopefull not all of my drives. Hopefully just the ones in the DiskStation

So, I'm sitting here waiting for this "parity check" process to finish. It takes a long time. I'm not sure how long, but hours. OK. So, I started this process at roughly 3:00 p.m. It's been running for roughly 7 hours. It's 30% done. So, a rough calculation says it will run for about 22 hours and complete at about 1:00 pm tomorrow afternoon.

So, in the mean time, I'm left her trying to decide how to configure this RAID. My assumption was that I would configure it as RAID level 5, same as the WD ShareSpace is set up. However, for whatever reason, the box is preconfigured to run as a proprietary RAID format that I'm not familiar with...the "Synology Hybrid RAID". I dunno about this technology, but I was concerned when I noticed that it only shows the Capacity as 8.05 TB. Now, always when you buy storage, it's never really as much as they claim. Why? I dunno. Because they lie? System overhead? It doesn't really matter. It's just always less than you'd thought that you purchased.

But to drop from 12 TB to 8 TB seems like a larger hit than I was anticipating. My numbers say 3 TB * 3 = 9 TB. So, I was hoping for 9 TB, I guess. And in theory, I'd get this much from RAID Level 5. In theory, anyway.

But then, I noticed that each of the 3 TB drives really only have 2.73 TB of storage.

So, if you assume each drive really only has 2.73 TB, then 3 * 2.73 TB is 8.1 TB. I was planning on reconfiguring the box over to RAID Level 5, but I'm not clear that I'd get any more disk space by doing this. If so, it would almost certainly be less than 1 TB.

Synology has a RAID calculator online that I'll check out.

So, if you drag four 3TB drives onto the RAID calculator, it shows that the Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) is the same as the RAID Level 5. Both show 9 TB available. Now, of course, I see 8.05 TB instead of 9 TB, but again, I think this is just shrinkage. I don't think I'll free up any space by switching to RAID Level 5, so I'll stick with their proprietary SHR RAID format.

It should be ready to use in just 14 more hours or so. :)