Thursday, August 23, 2012

A NAS setup !

About a month back, I procured a Synology NAS box DS 212j. It was purchased from Amazon.com for about USD 200. A friend was kind enough to order it and get it for me. However, it was got in a unpacked condition and somewhere along the line the setup cd cracked.

Wrote a email to Synology asking if they had a online image of the cd which I could download, or then instructions for setting up the NAS similar to what must have been on the CD.

Got a reply saying all the required software is on there website and I should download it,

Short and sweet, no hand holding there :-)

Spent some time on Tom's Hardware site, and searching the net for which hdd to use. Finally settled on Western Digital RED NAS 3tb.

Got them for Rs 10,400 incl tax.

Did Consider Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm also 3tb which was priced at Rs 9,300 incl tax.

Also considered Hitachi, but there dealer had only one 3tb and I wanted 2 for the NAS Box.

So, a short while back I got delivery of the WDC Red NAS hdd's 2 nos. The dealer was kind enough to deliver them to my house. Must be a new one for these guys from Lamington road.  Normally they are so busy on there phones, they wont give you the time of day.

So, now I am going to unwrap the NAS and the HDD's and fit them.

OK, took a break, fixed the HDD's in the NAS.

Connected the NAS to the router and powered up.

Steps to follow.

Download Quick Installation guide.

Download User's Guide

Download  Synology  Assistant. Its a zip file.

Download DSM.xxx.pat installation file.

Download all other installations files or as required. I downloaded all.

Follow instructions from QIG.to Open NAS, Connect HDD's. Close NAS and connect required cables.

Unzip and then execute SynologyAssistantSetup-4.0-2216.exe. Will install and execute.

Unblock program fro firewall, otherwise it will not work.

NAS detected, status is Not installed. Version is 3.2-1963.

Double click on detected disk station to start the installation process.

Click browse and locate dsm.xxx.pat file previously downloaded.

Enter password for user admin

Reenter password

Default server name is diskstation. Change if you wish.

Create a Synology Hybrid Raid is ticked by default.

Click next.

Setup Network. (screen)

Get Network Configuration automatically is selected by default (dhcp)

ip address, subnet mask, Default gateway are populated as detected, DNS server is blank.

Click Finish.

Next screen is Installation Progress.

It may take over 10 mins, depending on the HDD size.

I am using Western Digital Red NAS 3tb x 2. WD30EFRX model.

OK, took a break there. Back after a couple of hours. The process of course does not take that long.

Logged in using the Assistant. Need to choose disk station and click or connect button, or double click on disk station.

After login, verifying and synchronizing process takes place. Takes a long time for a3tb. After about an hour of this (during which I spent time reading the User guide and reading up in the wiki about Disk groups and Volumes) decided I did not want the full capacity of the disk to be used as a single volume.

So go to Storage manager,  Click on Volumne, then click on remove. Click Yes etc to all the standard cationary warnings. Delete Volumne.

Click on Create, and created a SHR Volumne of 289 gb.

Shows the following

Capacity  284.47 Gb
Used        328.08 Mb
Available  284.15

Status verifying Hard disk in the background. (Re synchronizing 0.57%) (Taking long)
Parity check is currently run on raid 1, might affect overall system performance.

(well, I did click yes, to the bad sectors check, as this is new system and new hdd's as well)

OK, while this is going on, created another volume, with the remaining space 2500 Gb.

Taking some time to create, and after that it will start parity check. hmmm.

Wow, That took about 18 hours. Works out to about 6 hours per terabyte.