Synology CS-406 or Infrant NV

[wesg]

I know many people are looking into the idea of a small quiet NAS box that can run slimsever.

I've been looking into this and I've recently settled on either the Infrant NV or Synology CS406.

My key critera are RAID, 2TB total capacity (4x500GB), small size, reasonably quiet, good support, and ability to run slimsever. I do not have a pile of old computer gear and my space is limited so I'm staying away from the DIY arena.

Earlier Infant's NV were said to be noisy, however they have recently modified their product to a quieter version that is now shipping. The infrant box runs a 266MHz custom processor with 256MB DDR RAM, upgradeable to 1GB DDR RAM. However the reports I've been seeing suggest that even with the memory upgrade that slimsever 6.5 responces are a bit sluggish.

http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6252&start=15 See the post on Oct 2, by Heuer.

The Synology CS406 runs a 400 MHZ PPC with 128MB RAM. I have not found a synology forum, but I understand their support is good. In addition, it seems that a user community is supporting slimserver on the Synology, via flipflip's SSODS.

I have not been able to confirm if the synology will support 4x500GB in Raid 5. I also have not been able to confirm if the memory is upgradable or not. If anyone can fill in my gaps of understanding here I would appreciate it.

Does anyone have any sense on the performance of slimserver 6.5 on the Synology box and how it would compare to the infrant with the memory upgrade? I have a large and growing collection of FLAC files.

Thanks everyone

wesg

[flipflip]

A few answers on the CS-406.

- The support by Synology is NOT great. They do support, but they do not support SSODS or any other modifications to the box. And they don't even help doing so. E.g. you cannot get the full source code of the system and they don't tell us how to install a complete replacment of the system.
- The hardware seems to be engineered rather well, the software is (at least partly) an ugly hack (in my opinion).
- 4x500 = 2TB is possible AFAIK.
- 4 HDDs will be rather noisy.
- A memory upgrade is not possible at all.
- 128 MB is just about enough for SS 6.5.x. More would be better.

Regards,
flip

[wesg]

Thank you for your response flipflip. In short order you've answered most of my questions. I appreciate your commitment to SSODS.

Can you respond to the relative response time of slimserver 6.5 on the CS-406 as compared to the numbers quoted for the Infrant Box?

Thank you.

As I continue to consider my options I ponder if instead of a NAS I should consider a mac mini and a separate stack of HDDs. I don't think I can build a micro-itx any cheaper than the cost of a mini. I lose the RAID, but gain the ability to run slimsever at a high level of performance even as slimserver continues to gain in funcationality and required resources to run.

wesg

[flipflip]

Can you respond to the relative response time of slimserver 6.5 on the CS-406 as compared to the numbers quoted for the Infrant Box?


Ok. I have a DS-106x (128 MB, 266 MHz PowerPC). Library statistics are: 383 albums, 6136 Tracks, 145 artists, 28 genres, 523 hours playing time. Software: SlimServer 6.5.0, Perl 5.8.8, Linux 2.4.

The measurements are as follows:

Time to display album [s]: 2.1, 2.0, 2.0
Time to display tracks [s]: 1.1, 0.9, 0.9
Time to display music folder [s]: 2.1, 0.8, 0.7
Time to shuffle playlist (151 songs) [s]: 1.5, 1.5, 1.5
Time to forward track in random play [s]: 0.7, 0.9, 0.8
Time to add *all* tracks to the playlist [s]: 234
Time to shuffle playlist (6457 songs) [s]: 2.9, 2.4, 2.3
Time to forward track in random play [s]: 2.1, 2.0, 0.9

Hmm.. is there something wrong with these Qnap devices? AFAIK it is the same CPU running at the same speed as in the DS-106/106e/106x/101g+. The one in the CS-406 is also the same but faster.

It would be interesting to know what exactly needs time (slimserver? linux? mysql?)..

Regards,
flip

[wesg]

Thanks flip/flip sounds like a good system for your library size. The infrant box measurements were for a slightly larger number of songs and a much great number of albums so perhaps larger libraries start to get bogged down in the lack of memory.

Although the infrant box had lots of memory and similar performance.

Thanks again for the data point.

Wes g

[flipflip]

That's possible of course. And there are probably other factors like the harddisk speed, other processes running, cache status etc.

Probably on all (cheaper) NAS SlimServer will never run as fast as on a PC.

Performance of the web interface is another thing to keep in mind. It's sometimes annoyingly slow. It's usable, but I don't use it often.

flip