Synology DS1512+ Woes

A few days ago I started getting the message that 1 of the drives that makes up my RAID 1 configuration (Mirrored) has failed and performance was degraded. I figured I could wait it out and gradually migrate data off of the disk group AFTER Memorial Day.

My DS1512+ had other plans. So late last night (and I mean really  late – the wife woke up and called me a spaz for being awake on my MacBook Air at like 3am queuing up the contents of my drive while doing my work expenses) I had my spidey sense go off and I started moving stuff out of the bad disk group. low and behold this morning I woke up and the target space I was moving data to was filled with no free space and the disk group had entirely crashed.

now im thinking OMG I just lost data…

but I rebooted the NAS and even though I cannot browse the contents of it using the web based interface I can still FTP to it and move files. I noticed it got frozen on an ISO (made note of it) twice when I started to resume that so I skipped it.

Seems to be transferring just fine so far, sans the corrupted ISO file. my biggest annoyance right now is that from the DS1512+ to my local drive its transferring at speeds that would make baby Jesus cry 773MB to a SATA 6G drive and im moving data from that drive to a USB drive.. and that’s where my bottleneck is. My USB drive is happily churning along 29MB/s while the FTP transfer is happening SO much faster that I have to hit pause on FTP so it doesn’t fill up the drive faster then the data is being moved out of it

Thanks to the financial magic the wife has I went ahead and just purchased 5 of these. http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/nas-drives/nas-hdd/?sku=ST4000VN000 I was thinking id RAID 5 them since its supposed to give you a slightly higher performance as opposed to the Synology SHR but I was reading that with the SHR I wouldn’t have to wait until the raid is rebuilt everytime a drive needs replacement or if I upgrade one of the drives. Originally I had 5 drives, disk 1-2 were mirrored and shared as CIFS/SMB/NFS/FTP, disk 3-4 were mirrored shared via iSCSI for my VMware Lab. now im thinking I may just SHR all 5 drives as a massive unit and carve out 1tb in 2 iSCSI targets.

I also have a iOMEGA NAS (my other post) that I was debating allocating 1TB into another iSCSI target, thus giving me the ability to migrate VMs and ISOs across different hosted datastores.

I want to setup Hyper-V in my lab also and have a few VMs hosted on there as well to get some hands on on the new stuff Hyper-V is offering in the improvements of Server 2012 R2. Once I move data out of this I may start doing some performance testing on the iOMEGA as well since ive never used it the iSCSI features from it.