A while back I had a conversation with Synology and learned about their review program. After some discussion about different models for some testing scenarios I plan on doing, I received a very nice Synology DS1621+ well packaged. Currently disks are hard to come by, but I also received 4x Seagate IronWolf 4TB ST400NV008.
This blog series will go through some of the features and use case scenarios I’m planning on doing. This first part will focus on unpacking and getting the basic setup down.
The D1621+ is a rather powerful, 6 Bay NAS. Core specs are:
- AMD Ryzen V1500B 4-core 2.2 GHz Processor
- 4 x 10/100/1000M Network Interfaces
- 3 x USB3.0
- 4GB Memory
I thought 4GB Memory is a bit low especially paired with the Ryzen CPU. Synology agreed to include an extra 8GB of memory. It was very easy to install, put the NAS upside down, unscrew one screw and open a small cover. Insert the memory and we are ready to go.
I want to point out, this NAS feels very solid. It has a nice touch to it and appears very much as it could run forever. The case is made of metal, no plastic.
Next was to install the 4 drivers. I appreciated the toolless installation, pop off 2 plastic covers on each side of the tray, insert the drive and push the covers with their pins back in.
After powering it on and a quick look at my DHCP server for which IP it took, it was time to log in for the first time. The OS is not fully installed yet, so a wizard will walk you through the installation of DSM (Disk Station Manager). At the point of writing this, version 7.0 had come out and this is what will be installed. It should not take too long.
The next step will be setting up a storage pool. In my case I decided to create only one pool, but you could create several. Setting a RAID Level is the tricky one because it highly depends on your use case. I have 4x disks from Synology and I knew I had a matching extra one from my other NAS I was planning on using, giving me a total of 5. I decided to go with RAID 5 + 1x hot-spare, giving me a good compromise of fault tolerance and performance.
I also follow the 3-2-1 rule, 3 copies of your data (your production data and 2 backup copies) on two different media with one copy off-site for disaster recovery. I back up the NAS to an external, offline drive, more about this in a later post.
Once it was all done, (optimizing will take a while, but it runs in the background), “Central” (the name I gave the NAS) was in good shape.
It looks pretty nice in the homelab. Again, many thanks to Kyle Foster at Synology for letting me review and test this model.
More in part two of this series….(iSCSI setup, UPS, and so on)