Synology DS212+ Questions

wiglet

wiglet

wiglet

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Joined
20 Sep 2011
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26
Hi folks,

After reading numerous reviews online, I'm thinking of getting the Synology DS212+ NAS device from here. It looks solid enough and most people like it. I have a few questions:

1) Using the USB ports on the rear, can I connect an existing USB external drive (or 2) and thus share out its content over the network?

2) Is the SHR any good? My intention would be to populate it with a pair of 1TB drives initially, but would probably want to upgrade the drives to 2TB within 12 months. With SHR, can I remove 1 drive at a time, replace with a 2TB drive, wait for the storage to rebuild itself and then replace the second drive, to bring the capacity up to 2TB? Or does the RAID controller enable this to be done if configured initially with a RAID1 config?

3) Is it possible to configure the unit to power down the drives after a certain period of inactivity and then spin them back up when required?

4) What are the main differences between the DS212 and DS212+ other than the 212 being slightly cheaper?

Thanks!

Wiglet
 
1) Not sure. You can hook them up but not sure if that is just to allow backups or if it will allow you to expand the storage. If you do epxand the storage I think it might mean having to reformat as the enclosure uses EXT4 as a file system. Obviously if you can it would be a major bottleneck with the usb speed surely? USB3/Esata though shouldn't bottleneck it at all.

2) Yes SHR is good. Especially when using two drives that are not the same sizes. Can be done with Raid 1 also

3) Yes. You can setup multiple power plans to term the whole unti off and on. You can also set when to hibernate the disks. They will then wake back up when you access them.

4) The DS212+ has slightly faster CPU, more ram and esata support mainly. Most other differences are slight bumps in the amount of concurrent users who can access etc.

What will you be using it for?

I have done some reviews here. I feel the DS212 is the perfect balance of features/performance in a two bay solution for most unless you have business/operational reasons to go higher. Feel free to email me from my site or using the trust button and I will do my best to help you with any questions.
 
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Thanks for your reply welshdragon!

I would be using it for mostly serving out digital content, movies, tv shows etc to apple tv in my apartment. Also will probably utilise it with an esx host given that it supports iSCSI targets.

With regards to the usb ports on the back, the reason I ask is because I have 4 x 500gb and 1tb external drives at the moment that I'd like to connect to the synology and share out their content from it over the network, but not necessarily include in the storage pool, if you know what i mean. I understand that to copy to them I'd most likely need to go through my pc.

Does any have one of these that they can clarify the above for me please?
 
Just tried it with my USB drive. Worked fine. Gave me access to all the files and showed the flash drive as a share. Even let me map the stick to my desktop. So to answer your question it should work fine.
 
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