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Just thought id chime in and post my success. Motherboard used= Asus P6t v2 Deluxe Proc. I7920 Sata ports= 6 (port 5 always seen by DSM as esata, but can be used as a hot spare eathernet ports not recognized, had to add a intel pcix nic using it with 5 3 TB Samsung disks Everything seems to work except quick connect, avg read and right in a gig network is 110MB/s big files or small Plex works on 1080p transcoding to multiple clients w/o a hitch. Overall much better than my real 1512+ if I can help anyone with similar specs feel free to pm me. AND a BIG Thanks, to the creator

Hello, I am very interested in running XPEnology on my own hardware. I have been running a Synology rackstation for a couple of years but the performance is dismal and I now have the need to run heavy transcoding. One of the features I do love about synology is the power saving features. It is possible to get the same level of power saving with off the shelf hardware as synology does. Does the hibernation and spin down of hard drives and other features of DSM still work. I want to build a rackmount server with a Haswell Intel CPU and supported motherboard. I will also need a powersupply that is ultra low power and efficient along with hardware based raid and support for 4-8 drives. Has anyone built a server like this yet? Can anyone reccommend motherboard, powersupply, etc hardware configuration. I want the lowest TDP Intel Haswell processor with CPU to do heavy transcoding. All this would ideally be supported via DSM so it could run at very low power usage.

Hello everyone! In my personal project: Build Your Own NAS (BYON), i have achieved the following performance with my Synology DSM 4.2 build 3202. Setup details OS: Synology DSM 4.2 build 3202 CPU/Mobo: ECS NM70-I2 (V1.0) Memory: Kingston 1600MHZ 8GB DDR3 Power Supply: 130W PicoPSU & Dell 150W power adapter HDD1: WD Green 2TB (64MB/5400RPM) HDD2: Seagate Bar-Green 2TB (64MB/5900RPM) HDD3: Samsung EcoGreen F4 (32MB/5400RPM) USB thumbdrive 4Gb 3.3.1 Synology DSM Performance Test 3.3.2 Synology DSM Functionality Test 3.3.3 Synology DSM Plex Transcoding Test Any thoughts?

How are you doing? I came across this post and I was wondering what controller you found to be the most stable. I just prefer controller passthrough instead of RDM. I didn't find any real-world advantages to using VMDirectPathIO over the physical RDM capabilities using the PVSCSI driver. Using everything in an abstracted/virtualised environment just "feels" better to me, even if there is a (very slight - imperceptible) performance loss. My feeling is, should anything ever happen to this (old) hardware, I can quite readily replace any of it without affecting anything else operational on the machine. Also (somewhat unfortunately) in my testing I've found that this "home-brew" NAS under ESXI is performing better for me than my real Synology boxes. I'm moving over to using XPEnology personally - which I'm more than just a bit sad about. (Yes, I'm keeping my other Synologies!) But it's not surprising in a way, as I can use an old motherboard with crap-tons of memory and a good CPU in it, to have something perform better (Plex Transcoding, I'm looking at you!) than any box I could afford. It's obviously more power hungry, but through using ESXi, I've moved the firewall, mail server, web server, development platform, and an internal XP Administration VM onto the one machine. Is it now really that power-expensive? Not when you total up all machines. My current ESXi testing/storage system: (with 4 other VMs on the same box - Ubuntu, pfSense, Windows XP, and SME Server) [22Tb Storage (RAW), 360Gb ESXi Datastore (RAW) --- It's old gear re-purposed well - most everything is already in ark.intel.com! ] Intel® Desktop Board DQ45CB Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E8400 (6M Cache, 3.00 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB) 16GB RAM - 2 x G.SKILL 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit (from old gaming machine) 360GB ESXi Datastore - 2 x Intel® SSD 520 Series - (180GB, 2.5in SATA 6Gb/s, 25nm, MLC) - All on Intel MB SATA ServeRAID M1015 SAS/SATA Controller 16TB SHR RAID (2 x 4 disk volumes) - 8 x Western Digital Red WD20EFRX 2TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" - All on ServeRAID flashed to IT mode, in physical RDM mapping 6TB SHR RAID - 4 x Western Digital WD Green WD15EARX 1.5TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" - All on Intel MB SATA, in physical RDM mapping Thermaltake Xaser III V1000A Black Chassis: 1.0mm SECC Japan Steel; Front Panel: Aluminum ATX Full Tower Computer Case Cooler Master 4-in-3 Device Module Toughpower Standard 1000W PSU with Cable Management (Discontinued) Custom SATA Cables - self-built (2 x 3 SATA Power Connectors) plugged into PSU for Hard Drives Cruzer Fit™ USB Flash Drive (4Gb) - ESXi Boot Media 2 x Cheap & Nasty 4 Port PCI USB 2.0 Cards for VM Passthrough of USB I did give a few other cards a (short) try - Sil 3114, Sil 3124, Sil 3132, and a crappy JMicron JMB363 in ESXI. For the JMicron I don't think I tested it in passthrough (used a self-compiled/installed ESXi driver). All appeared to work fine in RDM, but I only tested for a short time in Passthrough - for my own interest. I believe it was the Sil 3132 I used for my performance testing & comparison. In short - most stable ... PVSCSI physical RDM - Hardware as above. Very happy to date. [Edit - fixed RAM - looked up the wrong one!]

I found this board because I was exploring if DSM could be ported to the Raspberry Pi. But this is way more interesting. I have some noob-questions, and I suspect I know the answer to some, but just to be absolutely clear: - I can install this on an N40L and this will act like a proper synology nas? - What would happen in the future if the server dies? Can I pull out a drive, put it in a USB enclosure, and access my data? - Can I just install any of the packages that Synology offers in their 'appstore'? - Could transcoding video to tablets and phones work using things like Plex? - How fast are filetransfers? - How will updating to new versions of DSM work? Will it even be possible? - If I put in two drives now, can I add a third later? What will that do? - Is it recommended to modify the bios or not? - Does the device go into standby or low-power when there is no activity? - Is this legal? If not: will Synology be able to block access to their services? - How does DSM react to things like the VGA out? - How does it react to internal audio-out? Does that work? - Does the built-in raid do anything? Or are Synology boxes normally software raid? - Does USB support work properly, so I can hook up a USB audiocard or USB TV-Tuner? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!