Alfa BBT

One of the important features of the new (unboxing here) Atom based Synology NASses is Wake-On-Lan. This technology keeps the network interface powered on when the remainder of the device is powered of. The goal is to let you power on the device over the network by sending a “magic packet”, which is based on the MAC-address of the target network adapter.

The MAC address of a Synology NAS can be found in the admin interface:

For those of you looking how to remotely shutdown the NAS while testing; the command can be found in the right top corner ;-)

First of all you should activate the WoL feature under “System > Power”:

I decided to give free SolarWinds WoL utility a try as suggested by smallnetbuilder. It’s limited featureset is more than sufficient for a little home network, but you’ll need to provide an e-mail address before they allow you to download it.

Open the SolarWinds Wake-On-Lan tool and enter both the IP- and MAC-address of your NAS. Click the “Wake Up PC”-button:

Click “OK” on the notification window:

A little monitor pops up…

…and alerts you when the target is powered on.

The whole process takes about a minute.

After having this solution approved by the Misses I scheduled the NAS to power down every night @ 3AM.

This leaves sufficient of a time window to use the NAS for downloading stuff overnight:

“Nachtsurfen” as we call it (between 00:00 and 10:00) reduces the download limit with only 50% of the size of the downloaded package.

I’m using a WD NetCenter for my home storage needs since about 3.5 years. This unit is not only very slow but it also has a very basic feature-set. It’s not possible to reorganize your data (move files around, rename shares etc) via the web interface. There’s no console access possible either.

Hence a decent NAS was on my wishlist for some time already. The needs/nice-to-haves I had in mind were:

• 2 or 4 disk model:  I want to use RAID (on top of regular backups) to better protect my data, so 2 hard disks is a minimum. A 4 disk unit might be more future proof.
• Capacity: The NetCenter unit has only 500Gb, but data is growing steadily as the Misses likes to play around with Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. I’ll start with recuperating 2x 1Tb disk I have sitting in another machine. I can upgrade to 2x 2Tb later if needed.
• Network: gigabit
• Budget: not unlimited ;-)
• Full-featured management tools
• Some form of Download manager
• Better performance
• Energy saving features e.g. hibernation, WOL etc…
• ISCI

When Synology published the official press release on the DS710+ last week it was time to treat myself on a late, it’s February after all, new years present. It went quite fast actually:

1. 11/02 – Press release
2. 15/02 – Noticed the device in a trusted web shop as “out of stock”. Signed up to be notified by e-mail notification when the device is in stock.
3. 16/02 – “In stock” e-mail notification. Ordered about half an hour before the deadline for next day delivery.
4. 17/02 – Package arrived about 14(!) hours later

Last but not least, the unboxing pics;

I did look into QNAP too as they have a similar unit, Ts-259 Pro-Turbo, but went for Synology because the communtity seems lager in our region and the features match a tiny bit better with my needs. For those interested; both manufacturers have demo environment of their management tools online:

• http://demo.synology.com:5000 (Account=”admin”, Password=”synology”)
• http://www.qnap.com/liveDemo.asp (Account=”qnap”, Password=”qnap”)

Update 2010-03-06: If I wetted your appetite with the pics above, proceed to Overclock3d.net for some detailed shots of the internals of Synology’s DS710+