2012-03-15, 17:11
In my quest for a reliable solution for NAS storage for XBMC I settled on the Synology Diskstation 1511+. Setup is a breeze. The unit holds up to 5 drives and you simply slide out each bay and screw in your drive and then slide it back in. I inserted 5x 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives and powered up the system. After a brief bootup period and LED on each drive lit up green to let me know it was online.
The included software CD installs Drive Assistant which just basically finds your diskstation on the network and give you a URL icon for the unit. the Diskstation's OS is spectacular and easy to use. Unlike other solutions where you need to set up remote desktop access or a terminal, the OS is fully browser based with a complete graphical user interface. The OS had an easy setup wizard which recognized my drives and set up the best solution which in my case was Synology "Hybrid RAID" which I believe is similar to RAID5. The OS formatted the drives and prepped the RAID in a matter of minutes. It then did a consistency check which took several hours so I let it go overnight. Upon waking up in the morning, the consistency check was done and the RAID was ready.
Next, I created "shares" for my media: "Pat HD Movies", "Pat TV Shows", and "Pat Pictures" to start. Windows readily recognized the Diskstation on the network as well as my shares. I copied over my movies, tv shows, and pictures to their respective folders and then it was on to XBMC.
Once tested, I ran CAT6 cabling to my basement and hid away the Diskstation and connected it to a UPS in the event of a power outage.
In XBMC, I specified SMB for my source and it easily found my Diskstation shares and scraped my media. Access to all of my media is instant and the Diskstation has worked flawlessly with an up time of about 3 weeks so far.
The nice thing about the Synology unit is that they can be "chained". If my storage needs grow, all I need to do is add another unit and more drives and I can seamlessly have more space for my media.
The quality of the unit, software, and ease of use easily score a 10/10 for me. Synology keeps the OS updated regularly and in fact just recently released a major upgrade of 4.0.
After weeks and weeks of frustrating time wasting with Windows Home Server and other software based solutions which require Linux knowledge to use, I can say that the Synology Diskstation has been a Godsend for someone like me who has the money and wants a solution that just works without hours of manual setup.
The included software CD installs Drive Assistant which just basically finds your diskstation on the network and give you a URL icon for the unit. the Diskstation's OS is spectacular and easy to use. Unlike other solutions where you need to set up remote desktop access or a terminal, the OS is fully browser based with a complete graphical user interface. The OS had an easy setup wizard which recognized my drives and set up the best solution which in my case was Synology "Hybrid RAID" which I believe is similar to RAID5. The OS formatted the drives and prepped the RAID in a matter of minutes. It then did a consistency check which took several hours so I let it go overnight. Upon waking up in the morning, the consistency check was done and the RAID was ready.
Next, I created "shares" for my media: "Pat HD Movies", "Pat TV Shows", and "Pat Pictures" to start. Windows readily recognized the Diskstation on the network as well as my shares. I copied over my movies, tv shows, and pictures to their respective folders and then it was on to XBMC.
Once tested, I ran CAT6 cabling to my basement and hid away the Diskstation and connected it to a UPS in the event of a power outage.
In XBMC, I specified SMB for my source and it easily found my Diskstation shares and scraped my media. Access to all of my media is instant and the Diskstation has worked flawlessly with an up time of about 3 weeks so far.
The nice thing about the Synology unit is that they can be "chained". If my storage needs grow, all I need to do is add another unit and more drives and I can seamlessly have more space for my media.
The quality of the unit, software, and ease of use easily score a 10/10 for me. Synology keeps the OS updated regularly and in fact just recently released a major upgrade of 4.0.
After weeks and weeks of frustrating time wasting with Windows Home Server and other software based solutions which require Linux knowledge to use, I can say that the Synology Diskstation has been a Godsend for someone like me who has the money and wants a solution that just works without hours of manual setup.