A New Switch for a New Day
I am constantly on the hunt for new switches. Between finding the right combination of
Over the years, it's safe to say my storage needs have evolved. What started off as a handful of Western Digital USB drives has evolved into a multiple multi-Terabyte ZFS arrays with numerous backups.
Some time ago, I migrated my main file server from a TS140 to a SYS-E300-8D. The reasons were pretty simple. I wanted something small and quiet and that sipped power. Both were connected to an external 12 bay drive enclosure, so it's actually less of a migration and more of a "unplug cable from server #1 and plug into server #2". Easy and integrated 10GbE was a plus as well.
As I quickly found out, even switching servers didn't really fix the core problem. The disk array still sucked a bunch of power, upwards of 75 watts without drives. And it was loud. I mean jet engine loud.
Unfortunately the cooling in that particular enclosure is terrible, and I had a bunch of drives that ran hot anyway. This combination resulted in fans that needed to run at almost full speed to keep the drives below 50C.
A DS2015xs was my solution. Synology has developed software that is probably second to none.
There's a problem. The DS2015xs is a bit of a weird product. It's got 10GbE in it, but it's completely incapable of actually saturating that connection. The CPU is a bit of a turd, and I'm pretty sure there is a bug in the more recent versions of the DSM software. Any iSCSI traffic would kill the whole array.
So with great regret, I returned the unit and started a new plan.
I was torn on my next steps. The thing I adored about the DS2015xs was that it was quiet, and it absolutely sipped power. It was going to be a bit difficult to replicate that setup.
I started looking at building an entirely new server. I figured I could drop all the drives in a big case, put a power-sipping cpu/motherboard in there, and be good to go.
I played with a bunch of combinations. Most of them were revolving around a C2750 from Asus (which unfortunately was reviewed VERY poorly) or another D-1508 or D-1518.
After spending weeks playing with various potential setups, that's when I decided the SYS-E300-8D was getting Frankenboxed.