Synology DS414j: An Ideal Backup NAS
by Ganesh T S on July 10, 2014 9:00 AM ESTMiscellaneous Aspects & Concluding Remarks
The DS414j is a 4-bay NAS, and most users are going to use it in a RAID-5 configuration for optimal balance of redundancy and capacity. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild testing as well as power consumption evaluation with the unit configured in RAID-5. The disks used for benchmarking (Western Digital WD4000FYYZ) were also used in this section. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| Synology DS414j RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power |
| Single Disk Init (4TB in JBOD) | 40m 9s | 19.53 W |
| 4 TB JBOD (1D) to 4 TB RAID-1 (2D) | 12h 57m 42s | 30.83 W |
| 4 TB RAID-1 (2D) to 8 TB RAID-5 (3D) | 56h 48m 29s | 39.43 W |
| 8 TB RAID-5 (3D) to 12 TB RAID-5 (4D) | 57h 14m 15s | 48.63 W |
| 12 TB RAID-5 Rebuild (4D) | 58h 56m 48s | 48.31 W |
Coming to the business end of the review, the DS414j comes across as a great way to get introduced to DSM while also ensuring that plenty of storage capacity is available. Performance is on par with other current ARM-based NAS platforms. Unlike other vendors, Synology doesn't hide away DSM features just because of the entry level pricing (I have seen other vendors avoid iSCSI in consumer units, for example).
Due to the absence of hot-swap capabilities officially, we would hesitate to recommend the DS414j as a primary NAS even for home users. However, its stellar performance (considering price class) and Synology's collection of apps for bidirectional synchronization with cloud services as well as other Synology NAS units make the DS414j an ideal backup candidate for SOHOs as well as the average consumer. Our only complaints are related to hot-swap being advertised as not available when the board and DSM actually support it and the convoluted chassis / drive cage design just for the sake of avoiding hot-swap. The RAID rebuild times are also the worst of all the 4-bay NAS units that we have evaluated so far..
Synology's 414j is targeted towards the same market segment that the Western Digital EX4 and the LenovoEMC ix4-300d currently serve. Performance is comparable and so are the feature sets (for example, DS414j and jx4-300d both don't support hot-swap). However, the DS414j is twice the cost of the ix4-300d. Synology's products carry a premium, and the pricing of the DS414j reflect that. Other than this pricing aspect and a few minor concerns voiced in the previous paragraph, the DS414j turns out to be a stable, reliable and feature-rich model.
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edzieba - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
Why RAID10 rather than RAID6 (or RAIDZ2)? Surely the superior robustness is worth the minimal performance reduction?JimmaDaRustla - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
RAID 6 has no space efficiency over RAID 1+0 in a 4 drive setup. It also has no write performance gains, especially when considering it needs to calculate the parity blocks. And read speed is theoretically slower since RAID 1+0 has two sets of data to work off of. And lastly, if a drive dies, RAID 1+0 has no performance decrease, but RAID 6 would take a hit because it would need to calculate blocks using the parity.JimmaDaRustla - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
Edit: I'm amateur though, not sure if there is more to RAID 6, but in a 4 drive setup, I would go with RAID 1+0bernstein - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
RAID6 in a 4bay home nas is just asking for unnecessary trouble. However RAID6 can take the death of any two drives, whereas in RAID 1+0 if the wrong two drives fail your data is toast. But if you value your data enough to invest in a NAS with RAID1/5/6 you actually want RAIDZ2.piroroadkill - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
4-bay NAS is such a pain in the ass! For years I've seen 4-bays across the board, but that's never been enough.DanNeely - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
Because 2/4 bay units are enough for the vast majority of home users.Gunbuster - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
Also no ARM chip is going to keep up with the overhead of more drive bays. You get a real server or SAN for that.Samus - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
Not necessarily CPU limited. I have an Areca RAID controller with 8 SAS channels (and up to three arrays) on an XSCALE 800MHz CPU with good overall performance. It's running two arrays in a server (one array is three S3500 SSD's, another is five 900GB SAS drive.)I simulated a drive failure by pulling power from one of the 900GB SAS drives, wiping it, and reattaching it while in Server 2012 and it rebuilt the array (3.5TB, 2TB of data) in ~10 hours while maintaining high availability. A tax system running in Hyper-V and the 50GB exchange store resided on that array while being rebuilt.
M/2 - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
I agree. I've never understood I would want to go thru the trouble of configuring NAS and then live slow throughput. Especially when I can connect a USB3 RAID to any cheap server (I've got a $600 Mac Mini) and get better performance. I get 104 MB/s on my external drive over the network vs. 240 MB/s locally. That's over gigabit ethernet, I get about 23-30 Mb/s on 5 Ghz Wifi-N. But, I'm just a home user, what do I know? Maybe when you get many users, there's an advantage, but look at how slow!DanNeely - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
Feeding multiple computers is one of the primary reasons to use a NAS instead of just connecting more drives locally.