July 11th, 2010
darylsoh
After pondering for quite a while to get a NAS solution, I decided to go ahead to get a Synology DS410J.
The package came in a nice little brown box, the build quality of the DS410J was not bad. Opening and installing the hard drive in the chassis was hassle free.
As I was low on budget, I only managed to purchase 1 x 2TB Hitachi Deskstar harddisk (HDS722020ALA330). Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 was chosen as it was relatively lower cost compare to Western Digital and Seagate at that point of time, and it is listed in Synology as one of the compatible hard disk.
After installing the latest DSM version 2.3-1157, I proceed to the Volume Manager under Storage. As I only had one hard disk installed, I was only able to set up a basic volume.
Preparing the hard disk for Synology NAS was kinda painfully slow as I choose to do a thorough scan of the hard disk before formatting. The whole process took a whopping 16 hrs just to do that. Probably I shouldn’t expect much from the DS410J as it is meant for home usage rather than enterprise but 16 hrs was abit too much for me.
I will share my experience on the DS410J performance later when I have time again.
July 4th, 2010
darylsoh
After upgrading my home network backbone with the Aztech 1000Mbps Powerline homeplug HL280E, I was expecting some serious performance upgrade (file transfer rate) in my network. Ya.. with the powerline streaming 1080p contents was no issue at all. But the transfer rate between my PC and my NAS was disappointing.
The NAS I am using is Planex NAS-01g equipped with a PATA 400GB HDD. It’s connected via a Dlink DGS-1005D switch. A simple test was done by simply copying a 8GB file from my desktop to the NAS. The results that I gotten was a devastating average of 10-11 MB/s. How can this be? The NAS-01g was equipped with a gigabit ethernet connection as well.
For a parallel ATA, the transfer rate will range from 16MB/s to 133MB/s, my HDD is an ATA 100, so getting a 10-11MB/s transfer rate is quite miserable.
Enabling jumbo frame support in the NAS (set to 4000) doesn’t help much as well. A few more things that I have done to improve on the transfer speed.
1) Turn off the Remote Differential Compression in Windows 7
2) Disabling IPv6
3) Disabling other unnecessary protocols
The above steps did not help to improve on the performance as well.
Finally to clear my doubts, David took his home brew NAS to my place and hooked it up on my network. The results was good.. The read and write speed were holding steadily around 40-48MB/s, and his NAS was an IBM thinkpad X60 installed with Open filer running on a single HDD. My 1Gbps ethernet on my PC was hitting near 100% as well.
The results was clear, very likely it’s due to the slow processor in the NAS-01g which is a Motorola MPC8241 266MHz running on a 64MB ram.
Probably it’s time for me to look into getting a new NAS, as my data are getting larger by the day due to shooting RAW from my cameras and HD videos captured on my Lumix.
So anyone gotten better results from your NAS-01g?
June 10th, 2010
darylsoh
The price of the widely anticipated Aztech 1000Mbps HomePlug HL280E was announced. Currently it’s available @ PC show and Challenger Stores in Singapore @ SGD $199.
Can’t wait to get my hands on this baby. 
