Don't buy the 3TB version for $469..... how they can charge almost $500 for the ds112 with a 3TB drive is beyond me. It can't take them more than half an hour to install the software for you and they're charging $169 more for that? Just get the $200 diskless version and add your own drive for $100. I chose a WD 3.5" Green 2TB which cost around $85. 3TB would probably cost around $120 or so. You just slot it in and screw in 4 screws. Then screw the case on using 2 screws. Download the DSM OS (100MB download) and the pat file (100MB download) from synologys website or your included CD, and use the synology assistant (30MB download or so) to install it and you're ready to go for WELL UNDER $469! ...about $300 depending on which drive you choose. So buy your own drive and save $$$.
For info on what Gigabit ethernet speeds should be, see the excellent article "Gigabit Ethernet: Dude, Where's My Bandwidth?" (do a google search for it). It certainly helped me with what our expectations should be regarding speed of file transfers..
On with the review!
Total equipment used:
cheap $330 asus laptop x401a
ea6500 Linksys/Cisco router firmware 1.1.28147876
wumc710 firmware 1.0.01
cat 6 (50 foot) cable for ease of use with wumc
synology ds112 nas with DSM 4.2 OS (pat file used = DSM_DS112_3211.pat)
wd tv live firmware 1.14.09 *people report problems with later firmwares than this on the WD TV Live. *not going to update*
Firstly, our main goal was to stream big 1080p DTS movies through the house wirelessly. Nothing else really occurred to me to be important in comparison.
Previously we were trying to use a USB 3.0 hard drive attached to our ea6500 routers usb (2.0) port. Wow. Bad idea. It was so slow. Buffering constantly. Unwatchable for big movie files, even in mp4 format let alone mkv or m2ts which was impossible. I measured the throughput of the "USB 2.0" connection on the router to be LESS than 1MB/sec!! It was actually rating from 0.6MB to 0.9MB/sec which is FAR slower than when you connect a USB drive to your PC directly. So, it's a really bad idea to use the usb port on your router for media distribution in your house.
Enter the ds112 NAS...
Installed ds112 instead and now we can watch 1080p DTS encoded movies wirelessly. Even 13.8GB m2ts files over wireless N 5ghz. Amazing.
In case theres ever any stuttering, I got the wumc710 media connector (which requires a 5ghz router, preferably the new "wireless AC" type such as the ea6500 router from Linksys). The wumc710 or "wumc" as I call it ;) is mostly used for big file transfers because wireless is now fast thanks to NAS instead of routers usb port which I will never use again! :)
See my review of the wumc710 for more detailed info on my setup and how pleased I am with everything.
HD movies are now streamable, wireless and wired. NAS all the way baby!
I am just using the ds112 to stream movies, but it is one purchase I do not regret. It combined with ea6500 router, and the WD TV Live 1080p media player is a killer combo. the wumc710 sweetens it allowing 35MB/Sec (honest to goodness megabytes as we all know and love) wireless transfer to the ds112.
Wireless doesn't mean slow any more.
The NAS ds112 is quiet and runs cool. I copied my entire movie backups over to it from an external usb drive and it didn't flinch. I expected it to be boiling hot but no.
Oh, don't try to use the NAS without installing an internal drive in it. You can't just use an external usb drive afaik. I have a 3.5" western digital green 2TB installed in it and it's great.
Oh, another cool thing is I can now stream movies to my cheapo samsung conquer android phone using the FREE (and 4 star average rating!) android app, DS Video. I did this while also streaming the same movie to the WD TV Live AND my laptop (both using nothing fancy, just SMB windows sharing and in the PC's case, VLC player, no conversion going on) ALL at the same time!! I just did it for the thrill of seeing them all on different screens. On the phone, DS Video has all or most of the settings I usually require in a media player app and you can "lock" it so you don't press the screen and ruin your movie. It's ideal, fast and looks great. You can adjust aspect ratio, and even choose if the movie is software encoded or hardware encoded. It automatically chooses the best one itself though. The cover art as you browse through your movie collection is a really nice touch. My phone itself struggled with some of the bigger resolution movies (but still played all of them), but the wireless speed and the hard drive access on the nas were more than capable and it wasn't the ds112 fault.
The WD TV Live and PC playback are flawless for any movie I've thrown at them. Total opposite of how they were with the USB 3.0 Drive connected to the back of the router. I think they just have that on the ea6500 for cloud access because usb functionality on the router is so slow for movies. I realise the ea6500 router only has usb 2.0 ports, but it doesn't even use the full bandwidth of usb 2.0, I guess because it's just a router and it's busy doing all the other things routers need to do. Just a word of warning for those that see usb ports on the back of their router and think it's gonna be cool to setup a makeshift NAS that way..not a good way to do it at all. The ds112 on the other hand, flawless! Flawless playback of 13.8GB files and the like, both on WD TV Live and PC, wirelessly, and this is with my budget laptop with a 5400rpm drive!
Overall I am quite blown away by the ds112. I don't regret buying this model, it's perfect for me. It is expensive kind of but once you start using it, it will not feel like you wasted your money and you will actually become addicted to NAS devices! If you add in the price of a 3.5" hard drive it really does seem expensive, but what you get at the end of it is a drive that when plugged into your wireless router via cat5e or higher, can be accessed wirelessly from any device and give flawless playback of huge movies. m2ts, mkv, xvid all work fine. Any file will work fine and the speed is phenomenal.
My next NAS will be a Synology as I really like the DS Video app on my phone (though I will probably never use it until I get an android tablet (if ever, laptop all the way here! hehe)), and just how beautiful the DSM OS is. I have to mention again how quiet the ds112 is. It's amazing.
One more thing and perhaps most important, when I want to bring up drive Z: (what I mapped it as) it comes right up every time. Solid. Even the WD Live TV has no problems at all connecting to it. I feel this is a totally reliable NAS on first impression and do not regret the initial high cost of entry into this quality range of devices.
If you're in doubt as to whether a NAS is what you want, don't be. If you're reading this, chances are you would indeed benefit greatly from it.
I will probably never want a website, but the ds112 will host up to 30 of them! You can connect to it with SSH, or Telnet.
You can also download torrent files to the ds112 as it has it's own torrent downloader. You simply paste the link to it in a browser portal window to the ds112 and it starts downloading immediately. You can even set a watched folder if you want to actually save the .torrent files to a specified folder, it'll start downloading them that way too.
CPU usage on the ds112 is great, it hardly uses it's CPU at all, very efficient. It doesn't run hot. It gives you all this info in it's own Resource Monitor, which runs along with the other apps, in a browser window with beautiful graphics, it looks like a PC desktop in a browser tab! Giving you immediate remote access to all your files, allowing you to delete and copy/move/rename etc. Fantastic.
Thumbnail creation for pictures does seem to take a while though as some others have suggested. But that's only for media indexing for use with DLNA devices. You don't even need to install the DLNA Media Server, it doesn't come installed by default either. We've never had much luck with DLNA here, our Sony Bluray player hardly plays any video files over DLNA so we consider DLNA virtually useless to us right now. I'm not going to run the DLNA Media server just to look at photos on the bluray player. The WD TV Live does a good job of looking at photos using plain old SMB windows sharing. And obviously the PC is really fast at accessing the photos on the NAS using plain old windows explorer and your favourite image viewer so this whole thumbnail creation thing isn't a huge deal to me. Thumbnail creation in windows explorer is fine in comparison.
You don't ever get true gigabit ethernet speed (125MB/sec) on any device (though it's still faster than 10/100 ethernet), so the supplied cat5e is fine to connect the ds112 to your router. Most hardrives can't even achieve 125MB/sec but I have no doubt if hard drive controllers and the actual disks were faster, the ds112 would be right there going even faster. Most of the time I just transfer movies to the ds112 using wireless and getting speeds of 6MB/sec. If I have to move a lot of files, or very big files, I use my wumc710 media connector plugged into my laptop via cat6 ethernet cable (because it's 50ft I got cat6 for future proofing, I know, my cable from ds112 to router should be cat6 too really, though it might not make a difference I will try soon), ....and I still only get 35MB/sec. Saying that though, a 2GB file takes 90 seconds to a couple of minutes at most to copy over using this method. It feels like I'm plugged into the NAS directly, even though I'm in my office, 30-40 feet away from the router! The ds112 keeps up with me all the way.
So... ds112 from Synology...
11 out of 10. Great bang for buck!
6 stars!
(..See all my reviews for all the devices I've mentioned..)
| ブランド | Synology |
|---|---|
| メーカー | Synology |
| 製品サイズ | 25.4 x 25.4 x 15.24 cm; 907.18 g |
| 商品モデル番号 | DS112 |
| メーカーにより製造中止になりました | いいえ |
| 商品の寸法 幅 × 高さ | 25.4 x 25.4 x 15.2 cm |
| プロセッサ数 | 1 |
| RAM容量 | 0.25 GB |
| メモリタイプ | DDR3 SDRAM |
| HDDインターフェース | eSATA |
| ワット数 | 13.2 W |
| OS | linux, windows |
| 同梱バッテリー | いいえ |
| 商品の重量 | 907 g |
