Question 1

Does it come with the drives?

Accepted Answer

No. That's part of the beauty of these devices. You decide how large or small the disk drives need to be to meet your needs (or budget).

Synology has also designed a new quick install bracket for this model that allows you to install 4 drives in about 2 minutes.  No screws needed!

Question 2

Does this unit attach via ethernet to a router (or modem-router) or does it require additional hardware?

Accepted Answer

The unit has two Ethernet ports (You only use both if you have two separate networks or for fail-over. Most people only use one port). You connect an Ethernet cable to the DS412+ and connect it to a network switch. Most modern Wifi or Cable Modem Routers have a 4 port switch built into them, so you would connect it to one of those four ports.

One thing you do want to be sure of is that it is much better if the switch you are connecting to is a gigabit (or 1000) speed port connection. If the switch is a 100 speed connection your transfers will be very slow (The DS412+ has a gigabit connection.

Hope that helps.

Question 3

It says Diskless, what do you recommend putting in it?

Accepted Answer

There's a compatibility guide, you can find it on their website. I bought the system without knowing this and just got four 3TB WDs that had the best reviews. Although I found that the disks were not in the Compatibility list after unboxing the 412, I could not resist and gave it a try. I was lucky and have not had a problem with these since. I would recommend to get a hold of the documentation before you purchase it. I love this system even more after I found out you can install Serviio on it. We can't stop watching years of home videos that were piled inside all these external hard drives.

Question 4

is this proce with the disks?

Accepted Answer

No this doesn't come with disks.  Being a tech geek, I struggled with the notion of the price of this unit without disks.  However, when I considered the alternative of building a computer, or using an old one, I'd still have to install and configure an operating system, which can be a very daunting task and if you don't get it right you're going to have issues.  The main selling point for me on the Synology was that I have a Windows Phone, and Synology is the only NAS provider that has apps for IOS, Android and WP to access the NAS from anywhere in the world.  And setting this thing up was a snap, and I've also installed the Plex app on the NAS so that my Samsung Smart TV's can access my videos.

Question 5

Does this product include the hard drives, or do I need to buy them separately.  If not, how do I know what kind of drives to buy?

Accepted Answer

The device does not include hard drives.  I went on the cheap with 4 Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB drives.  It can handle higher drives sizes but our needs were basic.  I am using it for iscsi datastore for an esx host and as a cifs backup repository, neither of which are super demanding but we've been happy with it so far.

Question 6

I will be a first time NAS user, I am wondering if and how easy it is to set this as a network drive inside windows 7 & 8? I am looking to point applications to read and write to locations on the NAS.

I know this is most likely a incredibly stupid question and thank you in advance.

Accepted Answer

It's pretty easy to get this working with Windows 7/8, but using it as a datastore for applications may not be the best situation. The DS412+ will give a solid 100MB/s read/write over gigabit ethernet with larger files, but many smaller read/writes will have reduced performance, and depending on the application using it as a datastore, your mileage may vary.

I bought a DS412+ and then realized quickly that I probably shouldn't be using it for program data or windows system data. I then bought a cheap RAID card and 4 more drives and set up a RAID internally in m workstation. That has given great results.

Also, forget about link aggregation to get more throughput to the DS412+. I tried this and realized that it does not work as you might want it to. It did not double the throughput to the device, unfortunately.

Question 7

I consider myself reasonably tech savvy, BUT, I know nothing about servers.  I have a small business where I represent 100 artists with over 800 customers and I'm not sure how to go about hooking one of these up, the difficulty of use and setup and whether my artists and customers can access certain data.  Can anyone help me with some of these questions?

Thanks

Accepted Answer

The setup for a techie is fairly easy. If you understand things like mapping drives, setting up user accounts... you can do it. If you feel uncomfortable with it, hire a local techie to help you out. There are small businesses out there that handle these kind of things so you can focus on your business. Most offer affordable plans where you get x amount of hours help per month for a flat fee.

If your doing this yourself. Look at this more like a PC with disk space. You can set up users so they can only see that disk space on this PC. Really, it has a Linux GUI desktop interface that makes it easy to do. You will need to do some reading to understand what it is capable of.

Good luck!

Question 8

Can I start off with just two hard drives installed and then upgrade later to four total hard drives when I can afford it?  What if any upgrade issues would I face?

Accepted Answer

I started off with two 3TB drives.   I don't think you would face any upgrade issues later.  I'm using RAID 0 -- for highest reliability against failure.  Obviously, if you're starting with two drives some of the other RAID choices will be unavailable.  However, if you're planning to use RAID 0, you should be good starting with two and growing it as needed -- that's my plan as well.  Keep in mind that the rules for NAS are different than drives installed into your computer:

NAS Pros:  supports multiple users, will allow access over the internet

NAS Cons: NAS units "sleep" between  accesses (good for hardware life ..however)  So you may wait 25 seconds for your first read, after that it should read and write like an installed disk.

Question 9

I have a 411+ and the network died; drives are fine.  Can I swap the drives into this model and it still work?

Accepted Answer

Steve,

Yes you can.  I went from a 412+ to an 1813+.  Just install your drives in the same slots they were in, fire it up, go through the initial set up, and you're done.  When you log in, all your files, settings, accounts, etc. are just like it was.

Question 10

DUmb question but I'll ask.  Can I just buy only two HDD's and NOT use in RAID but simply as two separate hard drives each mapped to my computer? IF so, can I then just keep all my music files on one HDD and use the other one to back up the first drive onto manually when I want to?

Accepted Answer

Yes. You can use as many drives as you want (up to 4) and they can be set up as individual drives (volumes) or as a RAID group.
But as far as what you want to do, I'd recommend setting the drives up as a RAID1 volume which will mirror the 1st drive to the second automatically so you will never have to manually back up the first.  The only downfall is if you make some change to the 1st drive that you didn't want that would automatically be applied to the second, where as your idea would still have the last manual backup on the second.
Hope that helps.

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