Synology DiskStation 4-Bay 4 TB (4 x 1 TB) Network Attached Storage DS411J 4100 (White)

I've owned this DiskStation for about 5 months. Its my first purchase of a "file server" and we got it to have more available and protected storage for our family photos, videos and backup storage for several computers in the house. I'll pass along my experiences and advice.At first I thought this purchase was going to be the start of a nightmare. Unit arrived DOA. All connections, power adapter, etc. were fine. Requested an RMA and as I was packing the unit up for return noticed a ribbon cable between the front plate and motherboard was askew. Well why not give it a try? Removed enough screws to get the front face off and reseated the ribbon cable. That looked promising, so I reassembled all the hard drives, cabled it up and whew - its worked fine ever since.I had bought 4 WD 2TB drives to go into it, formatted it up with RAID5, carved it up into several volumes and started putting data onto it. The 8TB formatted down to 5.36TB with RAID5. I plugged in an old 250GB drive into the USB port and backed up the most critical of the files (photos). This thing runs silent. What a dream compared to the Windoze PC I have (and I will NEVER buy another Windoze PC again).Performance seems to be a bit slow compared to what I expected - about 11MB/s at best. But if I do the math, that is about as much as a 100Mbs ethernet can really be expected to do. Nevertheless, its more than enough to stream HD videos straight to my internet ready TV.DSM (the management software) is pretty good. Could really benefit from a good usability rewrite as many of the icons and options are in wierd places, but the documentation is very thorough and easy to search. Synology web site is straightforward and downloads of docs and other software is easy. There are lots of features, most of which I have yet to use. I have run the iTunes server, email notification, PhotoStation and a few others. I love the fact that Synology has apps that let you access it unit via an iPhone and I have them installed but have not yet configured the system to get through my home firewall/router.Fast forward 5 months. Used the email notification feature to get status messages sent to my personal account and one day, got notified of an I/O error on drive 2. That was worrisome. Everything seemed to be working ok though. Then the errors became more frequent and I started to panic. I checked the backup only to discover that the backup drive had filled up. So I grabbed another old USB drive and started copying all the new stuff not yet backed up to that drive. Halfway through that process, drive 2 failed completely. But - as it is supposed to - RAID5 worked. Volume showed in the interface as degraded (working as designed). Note - when volumes are degraded, the unit seems to take a LONG time to boot up - 5-10 min or more. Be patient - let the machine do its job. Also, MANY times the unit would not respond quickly or reliably to admin web page requests - keep trying. After 3 or 4 timeouts and failed attempts, mine started working (not sure why).So I ordered 2 more drives (same model), opened the case, replaced the failed drive 2, restarted the box (it says you can hot-swap while the unit is running - I was not so adventerous as to try this...) and followed the directions in the manual to repair the volume. As I write this, that process is nearly complete and appears to be going perfectly well.I read a lot of other reviews where people get a drive error, panic then start pulling drives and reformatting stuff. Do not do this. I admit - I got a drive error and I panic'd. Fortunately, I did not start pulling drives right away, but rather read about it and started copying off files to back them up. RAID is nice, but its not foolproof.If you are like me, DSM is something you will interact with a lot as you are setting it up, then almost never unless there is a problem (hopefully never or months later). Would be better if it was organized a bit better - e.g. "Troubleshooting" (which does not exist) in a very prominent place. Status reports too. As it is, these features a buried a couple of layers deep. Only searching the DSM manual helped.So here are the lessons I learned - 1) As others have said, if you are going to store important files (e.g. family photos or videos or anything you value) THEN HAVE A BACKUP SYSTEM IN PLACE. I will NEVER run without a backup again. 2) Don't panic if you see a drive error. Read and follow directions.Would I buy a DiskStation again? Yes. Had my unit not arrived DOA and the DSM interface not been quite so cryptic for startup, shutdown, status and troubleshooting, I would have rated it 5 stars. Check back in a year...

It's hard to come up with a final star rating on this one. It's built like a very cheap PC computer: Plastic disk cages that you have to screw into the chassis. Cheap plastic all over. Drive access is terrible.The initial install was rather odd. Getting the correct firmware and installing it, then configuring the drive setup was strange. The admin tool doesn't point you to the exact location of the latest firmware, just to the company's website. So plodding through and finding the latest/greatest version took a little time. First time through, I ended up with an older firmware. The admin tool should just go out and get the latest version without any user input.The initial setup kept failing due to a bad hard drive (1 of the 4 drives I installed), but never said that there was a bad drive. Just that it failed to format the drives. This makes me nervous in that if a NAS has one main goal, it's letting you know that a drive is failing or failed. So several hours were wasted removing and adding drives. And the warm fuzzy feeling never came back after that.However, after that initial hassle, using the web GUI to manage things was very nice and straight forward. The system was fairly quick (coming from a ReadyNAS NV) and I was able to copy files at about 38 MB/s to a RAID 5 four disk configuration. Which is nearly 3 times faster than my old ReadyNAS NV, both running with Jumbo Frames. This was straight network sharing, not iSCSI. I haven't tried that yet.Streaming capabilities are excellent. I could stream 1080p blu-ray movies and multiple lossless audio tracks simultaneously without a problem. Was a little concerned that the CPU is at 80% or so doing that. Photo album sharing is rather poor if you just copy images straight over to the unit. The CPU was pegged at 100% for days on end generating photo album web pages for my 100GB's of images. Since I work with photos often, that feature really kills the entire units performance. It really needs to be turned off if you are a photographer.Like I said, it's a tough call on this device. It has pros and cons. For me specifically, the cons seem to outweigh the pros. I am probably going to step up to a higher model, with easier disk access and more CPU power after I test the iSCSI side. But if you don't need that stuff, the price and features on this unit can't be beat and it seems like the firmware is actively developed, which isn't the case with Netgear's ReadyNAS NV+ at the same price point.

Habe es jetzt 3 Monate und bin mehr als Zufrieden .Es wird bei mir als Netzwerkspeicher benutzt.Ist immer erreichbar und funktioniert perfekt.