Synology CS407e with Hitachi 1Tb x 4 in RAID5

When I first purchased my CS407e, I had to wait for the hard disks as they were so new they were not in stock. I decided to fit a spare 200Gb Seagate Barracuda series 7200.9 to have play with the Synology OS.

I was impressed by the system as a whole, and the build quality of the chassis. The drive was easy to install and setup was a doddle.

When my four terra byte Hitachi’s arrived I was over the moon with excitement. I decide to fit them immediately. These drives are big energy users and I was a little worried about the unit being able to handle the spin up load, (which could have been anywhere up to 94 watts based on the specifications quoted by Hitachi).

They all were installed easily and cabling was no problem. The setup and loading of the firmware went smoothly and I very quickly had a RAID5 volume setup. I decided to skip the parity consistency check (and this then took two days to complete whilst using the unit!).

To be fair that was checking a 3Tb RAID volume while I was moving files over.

The Cube station correctly identified my APC550watt UPS when connected to the USB at the rear.

Once up and running I did experience intermittent system lock-ups. I liaised with the Synology technical people and did extensive testing myself (being somewhat of a systems analyst and uber-geek). I was theorising that the spin up on the Hitachi’s was causing too much of a power drain and thus causing the OS to lock. I found that the Hitachi’s also have power saving built in to them and can operate at three levels (low, medium and performance). As the RAID volume is on a network and only two or three persons would ever use it simultaneously, I decided to try and use the Hitachi software to set them to low all the time. Unfortunately the tools won’t work with these drives (least not in either of my SATA equipped NVidia chipset machines, nor the Silicon Image external interface), thus I abandoned this course.

I disabled the hibernation, but to no avail as the Hitachi’s were lowering their spin independently. When the disk was accessed, the Hitachi’s would all try to spin up to their performance level at the same time, and my feeling is that it was this that was causing the power drain.

My simple fix was to create a ‘keepalive’ script to simply run a ‘ls’ command on the volume root every 10 minutes. This worked well and kept the drives from entering their ’sleep’ modes.

Synology also tested these drives and found a hibernation issue (which is now fixed in the new firmware).

Since updating the unit to the new firmware, I have experienced no issues with hibernation at all. The update went smoothly with no loss of data whatsoever.

Overall I am extremely pleased with the CS407e and would most definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a good, solid storage solution.

Well this is local news to me and seeing the photo, its quite scary. Had the sandbank not been there, this cargo ship could well have sunk!

Excerpt from Typically Spanish:

It happened in the early hours of Sunday and the cargo of 37,000 tons of fuel on the tanker is said to be safe

A cargo boat which collided with a tanker off the coast of Algeciras and Gibraltar early on Sunday remains half-sunk one kilometre off Punta Europa, with its prow supported on the sea bed.

The ‘New Flame’ is flying under a Panamanian flag and is loaded with scrap metal. All the crew were safely brought off on Sunday and transferred to Gibraltar.

Spain is providing assistance to Gibraltar in the salvage operation to safely remove the 750 tons of fuel the ship is carrying in its tanks, and has sent teams of specialised divers from Algeciras and Galicia.

The other ship involved is the ‘Tom Gertrud,’ a double-hull tanker carrying 37,000 tons of crude oil. Its structure is said to be intact and there is no danger of a spill. It is flying the Danish flag.

Well I finally completed my PC rebuild. Now its in a proper size case (lian Li V2000B) and has SLI 8800GTX video cards with a 1000watt psu. All in all it was a large job and to fit my customised CPU cooler I had to get the cutting tools to my case, but I am very pleased with the result.

When I finalise my re-installation of Windows I will post a piccy of the internals and a final spec.

I am only waiting to swap out the CPU for an Intel E6850 (replacing my E6600 which will end up in one of my other rigs)….

Only the Creative soundcard gave me any problem (which is typical of creative - Great products / Shit support and drivers)..

tatty bye for now

I also edited my forum sig image (with the new CPU, but omitting the Creative XFi Fatal1ty Extreme Gamer card)