I recently purchased a Synology DS411slim NAS device for my home lab in order to quiet down my rack and start using up less power. Obviously to accomplish this I would need to fill it up with Solid State drives which have the added benefit of a large number of IOPS 🙂

I screwed my four 480GB OCZ SSD’s into the drive cages and slipped them into the chassis. Really my only con for this device was getting the drives into the chassis. I did have to do a bit of wiggling to get them seated correctly.

I powered up the device and plugged the NIC into my core switch and ran the installation utility. The first thing the utility did was run a discovery on the device.

Once the device was found, I pointed it to the DSM which I downloaded from the Synology site.

As you might hope, the wizard asks you to change the default password.

Enter the new IP information for the device. It will check for an IP address conflict before actually changing it.

Patiently wait for all of the tasks to complete.

When I was all done, I was able to access the NAS via a web browser. A quickstart is available to hep you find your way.

Once it was setup, I found that I got about 8000 IOPS while writing to disk. Not bad for such a tiny device.