Finally got a small NAS. Although it was tempting to get a bigger/faster one with 5 or 4 disk slots and a fast CPU, it’s way overkill for my purpose, so in the end, I went for a small DS212j plus a (for now) 3TB disk.
It’s plenty fast (75MB/s read via NFS), the GUI is awesome, the capabilities more than sufficient. It has some kinks though:
- The OS is on the disk and not in flash memory.
- If you have 2 different size disks, then if you create a mirrored volume, the rest of the space goes unused instead of being able to use it as a non-mirrored volume.
- Volumes always take full disks (or what is left after the OS is copied on them)
- To enable NFS, you need to first enable it, and then create shares (which are usually for Samba shares), and there enable NFS sharing too.
- To enable home directories, click on the user modules and click there on “User Home” and enable it and say which volume to use.
- Disk groups names are hardcoded: Disk group 1, Disk group 2 etc.
- Volume names are hardcoded: Volume 1, Volume 2 etc. They map to mount points called /volume1, /volume2 etc.
- The media server does not ask for the location of files. It defines it to be on a volume you pick.
If you have only 2 disks, do yourself a favor and get 2 of identical size and use a RAID-1 (or their hybrid volumes). Alternatively expect no mirroring whatsoever. If you have more disks (4 would be a good start), then this is much less of a problem.