erail wrote:
I've had no luck at all when trying your initial info for putting DSM on a EX495. I keep getting error 5 during the network install. I did get it up once and it had no access to the apps, it kept saying no connection to the packages. Now I do have a modified 495 with a quad core and 4 gig of memory but in reality that should make no difference. Is there any bios changes that have to be made?
Edit1: OK, got it installed - it was a little quirky but had to do with my Domain and windows 2012 essentials security. But still no access to packages even with firewall disabled.
Edit2: OK, got it to get the packages - had to do with DNS server with domain and router - needed the Comcast DNS IP. Actually it's pretty neat, I have Synology Servers and it does beat the pants off them. More testing needed and a way to keep the DSM updated is also a priority.
Hi erail,
I did have issues initially trying to install it as well through the Synology assistant. Just like you, I had a server 2012 essentials main server and I have no idea why it was causing some issues installing the original pat file. If the assistant software does not work, as soon as the unit boots up from the usb stick, you can just go straight to the web management console (type in the ip address the server gets from dhcp in any web browser), and it will give you the ability to install the dsm software through the webserver. I ended up taking the box home where I had a tomato router handling all DNS, DHCP traffic and it worked just fine.
Just like you, I have a q9550s and 4gigs of ram in my ex495 and poking around the ssh console, I could see that it recognizes all 4 cores, all 4 gigs of ram, the ahci ich9r chipset, the realtek nic. I think I'm going to try and eventually compile my own kernel and implement the driver for the drive bay lights (just to shut them off, I'm not at the level yet of figuring out how to tell it to work like the original).
I know for the amount of time I've spent getting this up and running, I could have purchased the ds412+ but I refuse to run any atom based processor NAS if I want it to transcode anything. If I want to find an equivalent synology with the power of the ex495 as a quad core, I have to look at one of their enterprise solutions, which has a dual core i3 processor and that box costs $3000 with no drives. The HP brand new cost me around $500 with a 1.5TB drive, the q9550s was $220 and the 4gb of ram was around $80. That's around $800.
I wish HP would just sell this NAS design to Synology, slap a usb 3.0 port on it, make the esata port replicator work with DSM and price it at around $600. Better yet, do what iosafe did with their N2 and license Synology's software.
Or I wish Microsoft would have actually made a WHS app store similar to what synology has done and allow developers to publish to it so we can have a 1 click install of packages.
Here's what's surprising me about DSM vs WHS 2011. On my other EX495 that's running WHS 2011, when I had the os running on a spindle drive, it would take a long time to log into the management tab, around 20 seconds, and I could never get the remote web access multimedia aspect working properly consistently (red x on photos, video transcoding was atrocious, music would work 99% of the time and when it stopped working, I would have to delete a db for it to reindex the collection properly). I figured it just couldn't keep up so I put in an intel x25-m g2 SSD and that made it fly. I still had problems with it indexing properly when I placed media in the video or photo directories, DLNA would just work flaky with the xbox360, the photos would never show up on the photo site, just spent an insane amount of time trying to get it to work as my central media hub with the built in tools. IT's saving grace and always has been it's saving grace is the deduplication client backup capabilities with bare metal restores. There's nothing else on the market like it and a good friend of mine that has 3 kids with their collections of music and videos on their computers, if you took the total of how much media they were all using up, including theprograms and os install, would total around 3tb of total storage, WHS client backup only used up around 600GB just to show you how well it's deduplication worked.
With DSM, it's not all roses all the time but it's saving grace is how fast it is in nearly everything I throw at it. I'm running around 2TB of data on 4 750gb drives I had laying around, it runs a proprietary hybrid raid file system that is scary if it ever goes bad but I've always been a believer in making backups of backups. Original machine -> NAS/Server -> Monthly external USB 3TB drive and daily crashplan backup to my own offsite server (not to crashplan servers). Here's what I'm running on this test server and how much ram it's consuming.
Audio Station (web-based audio server that has airplay and DLNA capabilities to push to any airplay capable device or DLNA capable device)
Cloud Station (Dropbox like sync service)
Couchpotato server
CrashPlan
DNS Server
Download Station
Headphones
iTunes Server
Java SE for Embedded Systems
Photo Station
Plex Media Server
Python
Sabnzbd
Sickbeard
Surveillance Station
VPN Server
All of that is using 513 megabytes of physical ram with about 1TB of data.
What I'm running on WHS 2011
utorrent
AnyDVD
CrashPlan
Mymovies
Plex Media Server
ServeToME
Stablebit Scanner
Stablebit Drivepool
Routing and Remote Access (for vpn services)
Skydrive
WebDAV for WHS
VirtualCloneDrive
TeamViewer 7
That's using around 1500MB of physical ram with around 3.5TB of data.
Transcoding on the Synology seemed to be about 25% faster than on the WHS 2011 box, which again is surprising as I'm running an SSD on the WHS box for the OS and applications where as on the Synology it's running off of the quasi-raid 5 (SHR) pool.
I guess I should stop rambling on and on but just wanted to share some of my experiences with you guys. BTW Alex, I loved your notification software that I purchased a few years ago when I was running WHS v1, it really was ahead of it's time.