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NAS upgrade at home, DS213+ vs. MyBookLive

Fuck off MyBookLive, welcome DS213+.

From the technical specs alone I would have preferred the QNAP TS-269L, but it doesn't have a good energy save mode and I really don't want my NAS to suck ~20W power 24/7. Otherwise the TS-269L from the benchmarks has significant horse power and the possibility to upgrade the RAM is also pretty nice. But it's also supposed to be quite noisey.

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I have to say, that I was never happy with the MyBookLive. That NAS has only 256 MB of RAM, but with all services running, it is swapping very often, resulting in really bad performance. There are a lot of indexing scripts Western Digital uses, that are total crap and they are being run much too often (like for every file change). While it got a good review in c't magazine, I can't recommend it at all. Opening my MP3 collection in the Finder takes like 20s and sometimes much more. It will be relegated to it's only proper use, a Time Machine storage.

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The Synology DS213+ main benefit is having a good sleep mode and a really, really excellent user interface. Like two generations ahead of what WD had to offer. From the way I read it, their partitioned RAID-1 system also sounds like a big advantage over plain RAID-1.

Another plus, it's very quiet, if it's not doing anything. (Which it usually doesn't in my case).

Everybody and their mother are putting Western Digital RED disks in their NAS. But wait a minute, why would I care so much, when I am using RAID-1 ? I  saved 20% of my money and got a potentially much faster harddisk instead, a Seagate ST3000DM001  with 7200 RPM. I like to save energy, when I don't need the system. But otherwise I prefer fast over reliable :)

But it isn't quite as powerful as I would like. Copying files with Samba, is not a problem at all for the DS213+. But if you use rsync, which to my surprise, is quite the CPU hog, you will probably not be able to saturate your harddisks. Opening my MP3 collection in the finder now only takes 3 seconds, which isn't great, but manageable.

I wouldn't buy anything less than a DS213+ for a home NAS now.