First NAS questions

[Noble]

Hello people of LinusTechTips,

 

I recently built my first real personal rig (Its in my history, if a bit tweaked from that) and I picked up a Synology DC216se with 2 WD 3TB Red drives as my Network attached storage for my rig and a few laptops. After reading on synologyies website I discovered that their NAS boxes can be used to transcode video. My model only supports up tp 720p naively but I was wondering if there was a 3rd party plugin that supports 1080p Transcoding on the DC216se?

 

As a side note, once I set up the NAS with 2 raided 3TB drives I only have collectively ~2.6 tb free on the "Drive" I know System files from DSM and other necessary files take up space so you dont actually get the full 3TB, but 400GB of files seems excessive, is this normal for RAIDed drives or synology Boxes?

 

Thanks!

-Noble

[Guest]

Which RAID configuration are you using? It's not unusual to lose as much as half of a single drive when on a two disk RAID.

[Oshino Shinobu]

As far as I know, there's no plug-in that allows it. If there is, the transcoding will likely be very slow. 

It's likely because of how the OS reports the size of the drive. There's a similar "issue" in Windows, where the system reads the sizes in Gibibytes and reports in Gibibytes, but uses the acronym for Gigabytes (GB). Due to the lack of conversion, the drives appear smaller. 3 Gigabytes (GB) = 2.79 Gibibytes (GiB).

[Noble]

27 minutes ago, TechEric said:

Which RAID configuration are you using? It's not unusual to lose as much as half of a single drive when on a two disk RAID.

Standard Raid 1 that is built into the Synology DSM OS, with 2 3TB WD Red drives.

 

23 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

As far as I know, there's no plug-in that allows it. If there is, the transcoding will likely be very slow. 

It's likely because of how the OS reports the size of the drive. There's a similar "issue" in Windows, where the system reads the sizes in Gibibytes and reports in Gibibytes, but uses the acronym for Gigabytes (GB). Due to the lack of conversion, the drives appear smaller. 3 Gigabytes (GB) = 2.79 Gibibytes (GiB).

Damn, that sucks. I thought it would be very slow but as long as it got the transcoding process off my main machine and I could run it overnight I would have been fine with that. Hmmm, I keep poking around.

And that actually makes a lot of sense actually when I look at the numbers, I will investigate when I get home later and see if that is the cause, is there a fix for it in windows? I guess I never bothered to care enough about my storage space to notice before.

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, Noble said:

Standard Raid 1 that is built into the Synology DSM OS, with 2 3TB WD Red drives.

 

Damn, that sucks. I thought it would be very slow but as long as it got the transcoding process off my main machine and I could run it overnight I would have been fine with that. Hmmm, I keep poking around.

And that actually makes a lot of sense actually when I look at the numbers, I will investigate when I get home later and see if that is the cause, is there a fix for it in windows? I guess I never bothered to care enough about my storage space to notice before.

There probably is. Maybe a registry edit could do a conversion of the units. It's not really a huge issue, as the sizes are correct, just the units are wrong. It seems like a weird oversight from Microsoft (they're not the only ones to do it, though). It's resulted in a load of misinformation regarding how many Megabytes are in a Gigabyte.

During my degree, I was told I was wrong when I said there are 1000 Megabytes in a Gigabyte, even though it's a decimal system. There are 1024 Mebibytes in a Gibibyte, which is the binary system that computers use for capacity sizes. The mixing/interchanging of the units should really be stopped, but hey, it doesn't really matter for the majority of consumers. 

[brwainer]

57 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

There probably is. Maybe a registry edit could do a conversion of the units. It's not really a huge issue, as the sizes are correct, just the units are wrong. It seems like a weird oversight from Microsoft (they're not the only ones to do it, though). It's resulted in a load of misinformation regarding how many Megabytes are in a Gigabyte.

During my degree, I was told I was wrong when I said there are 1000 Megabytes in a Gigabyte, even though it's a decimal system. There are 1024 Mebibytes in a Gibibyte, which is the binary system that computers use for capacity sizes. The mixing/interchanging of the units should really be stopped, but hey, it doesn't really matter for the majority of consumers. 

In the early days when it was megabytes and maybe gigabytes, the difference between 1000 and 1024 wasn't so bad, like 1MB = 0.95 MiB and 1GB = 0.93 GiB. Now it's getting kinda silly with 1TB = 0.909TiB (basically 0.91TiB). The 0.91 adds up more dramatically than the prior steps did:

2 -> 1.81

3 ->2.72

4 ->3.63

5 ->4.54

6 ->5.45

7 ->6.36

8 ->7.27

9 ->8.18

10 ->9.09

and the point at which the world might just burn:

11 -> 10.00