I feel that it does a few things wrong, emphasizing an nVidia graphics card that trails ATI’s mid-range offering, lacks significant RAM, and splurges on unneeded components like a DVD drive and spinning-disk hard drive. If I were to build an off the shelf gaming PC with the ample budget of $1000, using the same tricks (no peripherals, no OS, no LCD/LED monitor) as The Verge, here is what I’d buy:

The motherboard/CPU are virtually identical here and they are great picks–I also don’t care much about which case to use. However, I think this build is significantly stronger in the graphics/memory/drive arenas, and benefits from a cheaper 500W power supply. When you buy the ATI 6950 over the suggested nVidia 560 Ti, you get:

• Twice as much graphics RAM (2GB vs 1GB)
• 30 – 50W loaded less power consumption
• Similar performance

8 GB of RAM is OK, but when you have a 64 bit OS that can handle it all, why not put 16 GB into the system for $30 more? It’s a cheap easy win. And last, and possibly more controversially, I don’t see the need for an optical drive–everything is downloadable these days. I’d also rather have twice the SSD space than a slow spinning drive to load applications off.

Readers, what do you think? I’m sure my ATI preference will upset you…

Read more about the DS1511+ specs here

Network Base Configuration

The Synology NAS is using default MTU of 1500, connected to a Gigabit Ethernet Switch on LAN2. Testing with iperf shows a good gigabit connection between my PC and the NAS of around 885Mb/s:

Big_Bug> iperf -s
————————————————————
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 7] 0.0-20.0 sec 2.05 GBytes 882 Mbits/sec
[ 6] 0.0-30.0 sec 3.09 GBytes 885 Mbits/sec

In megabytes per second, we can transfer 110.625 MB/s. As you will see, this is actually slightly lower than the performance of the RAID array.

The Hard Drives

How fast are the triple-platter 2TB deskstar 5K3000s in RAID5? It can do a very reasonable 125 MB/s in unbuffered pure-disk performance:

Big_Bug> hdparm -t /dev/sda
Timing buffered disk reads: 374 MB in 3.01 seconds = 124.22 MB/sec

Benchmarking File Copy from Windows

To test how fast I can transfer from my PC to the NAS, I’ve created a 4GB binary file:

C:\Users\Elliott Bäck\Desktop>ls -l test.file
-rw-rw-rw- 1 Elliott Bäck 0 4693544330 2011-04-19 20:00 test.file

Copying this file in Windows 7’s explorer took just 50.5 seconds. Doing the math, this gives us an average write rate of 88.63 MB/s. How fast can we copy it back? It took 71.6 seconds, for an average read rate of 62.51 MB/s. Both of these number are going to be constrained by how fast my desktop PC’s Intel SSD can read/write. I also tested using Java and writing a RandomAccessFile with a ByteBuffer, which achieved 95MB/s write and 97MB/s read on a 1GB file.

Reliability & Temperature

You just need to open up the storage manager on the Synology DS1511+ NAS to see what a beauty it is, giving you a full SMART status readout on all your physical drives, as well as their temperatures. Even after running through my benchmarking, the drives were only 34^° C warm:

Conclusions

At nearly $900 for the NAS itself without drives, it’s pricey. But plugged into a Gigabit ethernet, the DS1511+ from Synology is also fast, cool, and quiet; the three things you want most from a NAS. Featurewise, it has a glorious UI, media servers built in (which I don’t use) and expandibility from 5 to a maximum of 15 drives. I anticipate phasing out my Drobos, with their proprietary technology, for the Synology NAS, which runs on open-source plain-vanilla linux.

There’s a forum post titled Brother HL-2170W – Kill A Watt readings? which offers a bit more insight:

Yeah, the Brother lasers do tend to have a solid surge when the fuser first starts to warm up. Some other makes include a current limiter and/or thermistor in the fuser unit heater to keep the inrush current from being quite so bad, but those do slow down the heating up to operating temperature. I used to have access to a circuit monitor with more sensitivity than the Kill-A-Watt meters. The wake up current draw on my Brother HL1670N could exceed 9 A, but it lasted for only about 50-100 ms before dropping back to the listed max draw. Lesser spikes would occur as the heating element cycled on and off to maintain temperature. It is one downside to Brother lasers, they keep the design simple and basic, and tend to be more reliable without some of the bells and whistles of other designs. But they can be harder on the electrical supply.

I suppose if you buy a laser printer, you’re in for a ride depending on its mood! Keep it off if you don’t need it.

OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 3 Build 2600
System Model D975XBX_
Processor x86 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 11 GenuineIntel ~2430 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Intel Corp. BX97510J.86A.1487.2007.0902.1724, 9/2/2007
Total Physical Memory 4,096.00 MB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys
I/O Port 0×000003C0-0×000003DF NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512
Model INTEL SSDSA2MH080G1GC

I think I’ve found two things that helped:

1. Not running Mozy Backup
2. Turning off virtual memory page files on non-SSD drives
3. Move Google Chrome’s profile to a hard disk

If anyone has other tips on getting rid of SSD stutters, let me know.

And now they’ve upped the ante with the Drobo Pro, an 8-bay enterprise version of the Drobo.

There’s a new “Dual Disk Redundancy” option will spread the data out such that the Drobo Pro array can suffer two simultaneous drive failures without any loss of data or interrupted service. You can even toggle this option on and off without having to rebuild the array. There’s also new connectivity via gigabit ethernet (iSCSI) as well as the older FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports. Linux, Windows, and Mac are supported, on NTFS, HFS Plus, EXT3 and FAT32. For more details, check out the data sheet.

You can buy one now for $1,300 from the Drobo store, or $900 if you exchange two old drobos for the new shiny model, something I’m horribly tempted to do right now.