Considering a Synology DS211j

[FSUguy]

Hey guys,

I'm new to the NAS thing. I have been using an external HD hooked up to my Airport Extreme to stream media, but its only a "pseudo" in the most broadest sense of the word NAS.

Anyway, i purchased 4TB of drives and on a whim the D-Link DNS 321. Wow, I usually do my research first and lets just say I am kicking myself in the a** for this one. The performance is in a word, atrocious.

Anyway, I am planning on returning it and getting something worthwhile. I was looking at getting possibly the DS211j, but I'm not sure if the performance is up to par with my needs.

Here they are:
1) probably going with RAID 0 or JBOD just because this will only have Blu Ray rips and some music on it
2) stream blu ray rips to a mac mini in the HT (everything is gigabit except the ethernet over powerline which is 200 mbps (my bottle neck, or wireless N))
3) I like the itunes server and iphone app as well
4) I really like the ability to dl NZBs (assuming it works well) so I can shut my Mac Mini off

This is really about it...I probably will have my drive for time machine backups hooked up through USB to the NAS.

I'm just curious if you guys think this thing would have enough power to do all of these well. Most likely not all of them at once, but it would be nice if it could.

Thanks

 

[FSUguy]

Any help or feedback would be amazing!!

 

[kamina]

When you talk about everything being gigabit apart from the powerline adaptor - is everything behind this adapter or only part of your set up?

Despite being labelled "200mbit" adapters, they generally don't get even close to that speed. A good pointer is already the fact that most 200mbit powerline adapters have a 100mbit socket (and won't even saturate the 100mbit link).

 

[MacYost]

Synology claims the DS211 to be faster than the DS211j. If you are worried about performance, you should take a look at that one. Also see:
http://www.synology.com/enu/products/2bay_perf.php

You can also look at the QNAP TS-219P+ (mind the "+"!). But is is more expensive. And take a good look at the various performance tests in the SmallNetBuilder NAS Charts at
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_nas/Itemid,190

Although Synology is (often) very speedy at writing large files, QNAP is faster when writing large amounts of small files. So for your Blue Ray content a Synology may be best, while QNAP is better for backing up drives from other computers. It all depends on how you use your NAS.

I have no experience with streaming Blue Ray content from a NAS, so cannot help you with that.