So far I have:

• Intel i3-2100 – stock cooler
• Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3
• Corsair Vengeance 8GB Low Profile
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 -750 GB, same as old build for now

That is to say a perfectly operational system. Or a good foundation to build on at least. I looked at a lot of other options as well, including the WDTV Live that I owned for a brief time, as well as Fusion/Atom builds and Llano.  But in the end I felt this was my best option. It’s a well-rounded system that will go great with a discrete GPU and has the power to handle any sort of task, including light gaming, MadVR and Hi10p.

I also got the Logitech K400 keyboard, which seem fairly ideal for HTPC use. Never used a touchpad before but it is at least easier to clean than the greasy trackball on my old keyboard. A reasonable keyboard at a reasonable cost. If Logitech could add a backlighting and some media keys it would be golden. Works well to bring the computer out of sleep (S3) but I’ve had problems getting it to work in DOS / Bios. It’s a good thing that Gigabyte has their Touchbios software.

I have a couple of upgrades in the pipeline of course, including a discrete GPU, quieter cooling, possibly including a PicoPSU and of course an SSD (still very costly for a computer you wont use much). But the GPU issue comes first. Just not sure what to get. Just about anything is better than the Intel HD2000 circuit of course, but I would really like something that can offer some light gaming possibilities. And at the very least best the Llano option that I turned down. Ideally I would also like CUDA support, but Nvidia cards are generally quite poor in terms of performance per watt. And I really shouldn’t go down a route that precludes ever being able to run a PicoPSU. At the end of the day I probably need to get the computer concealed inside a TV cabinet first to see whether temperature and noise are really issues.

Selecting a PicoPSU is even more of a nuisance. And a costly one that you can never be quite sure will work in the end. Running a discrete GPU and a reasonably normal system, you can’t get away with a 90 W PSU like some of these other builds you find online. In fact I wouldn’t get anything less than 150 or 160 W, but preferably I’d want one of those 200 W PSUs. Unfortunately, finding a power adapter that can do 200 W, wont cost a fortune and actually works is no easy task. Not to mention the soldering and jury-rigging that might be involved. I’ve never seen anything bigger than 150 W bricks readily available and to power a 200 W PSU you’d need to scavenge an older laptop brick like the Dell DA-2. But going down the PicoPSU route is certainly tempting. Not only will it reduce the noise and heat inside the case (and TV cabinet) but it will free up a lot of space inside the case, allowing for bigger CPU coolers. And it will be possible to add a 120mm fan where the PSU currently sits.

I must also take the opportunity to gripe about Truecrypt once more. Sure, I made a few mistakes the first time around in that I encrypted entire drives in one sweep, either by not partitioning first or by doing system encryption across partitions. But TC sure doesn’t make it easy for people to decrypt their data in the case of system encryption. Not only can you still not attempt decryption of system volumes created outside of the currently running OS, but decryption from DOS using the rescue disc is darn slow. And when you realize how slow it is and defer the process, the entire drive is borked until you go through with the decryption process. There is no option to reverse the decryption process. Nor is there a way to re-install or repair your OS without decrypting (or formatting). Took me almost 30 hours decrypting those 750 GB …

But buying long segments of utp cable is not so straightforward as it might seem. The only way to get a really good price was to buy a roll (100 meters at least). But I only wanted 50 meters tops, and that would have cost me over €30. It’s a good thing I checked Ebay.co.uk then, because here I found cat6 cabling for almost a third of the price (including shipping). Who knows about quality, but the cable I was about to buy locally wasn’t exactly high-grade either. We’ll see if this was a smart move or not.

I also ordered some miscellaneous network punch down and testing tools from China. I expect a lot longer delivery times on those though, given what happened last time. Clearly, European postal services and customs delay Chinese imports on purpose out of sheer spite. Last time I ordered something the package spent three days in China and three weeks in various places in Europe.

Now all I need is a spectacularly long ladder so I can get up to the attic and install some new cabling and connect the living room. My only regret in all of this is that I didn’t install more electrical tubing back in the day. Just as there is a phone outlet in every room, there should have been an ethernet port as well.

It’s hard not to be bitter. The two only 22 inch IPS 16:10 monitors on the market have now been discontinued. I’ve written about this at length before and the conclusion remains the same. Given my preferences there will be no model worth purchasing for years. Perhaps ever. I might have to go skipdiving for old CRT trinitron sets or I might have to wait for the next technology, beyond plasma, lcd or even oled. Welcome to the future … where we might just as well have flying cars before we have a display technology that can best the CRT.

Also, it sucks because I was hovering over the order button like a thousand times, thinking I should get a 22 inch IPS for redundancy.

Still using a 19 inch Trinitron 4:3 CRT. And I will give it up when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

SynoBlog also has fresh packages of Transmission (2.31), Midnight Commander (4.7.5), Sickbeard (2.0) and CouchPotato (2.0). So far everything has been working great despite some people griping over at the Synology forum, particularly on the topic of DSM 3.1 and Transmission compatibility.

Despite the obvious limitations of consumer level NAS units I have to say I have grown quite fond of this little toy and continue to be amazed by its potential. Can’t wait to see what manufacturers will come up with in a couple of years in terms of increased performance and lowered power consumption and acoustics.

I think this image sums up my test results nicely (handheld dslr macro ftw!).

It’s called ghosting ladies and gentlemen. Visualized using Prad’s Pixel Persistence Analyzer.

How could I have missed this? Well, I’m familiar with the idea of course, I’m not a complete idiot, but reading both professional reviews and users opinions for years I never got the impression that it was a big deal. Google the 2209WA + ghosting or indeed any monitor and you’ll find an endless number of opinions claiming that ghosting either doesn’t exist on the model or in fact is altogether a myth dating back to the earliest LCD models. In retrospect I have realized that it is the other way around. It has been so long since most people have seen a proper monitor or TV that they have simply forgotten what moving images used to look like.

Bottom line, this is a major deal breaker. I noticed this immediately in the first FPS game I tried, even before I had a name for it. At first I thought it had something to do with the 60 Hz limit or input lag. I now notice it in pretty much all games or applications where I have to pan around reasonably fast.

There have been claims that ghosting is less obvious on faster TN panels and 120 Hz TN panels in particular.  That may very well be true, but I am reluctant to trust any more of these so called experts that can’t even recognize ghosting in the first place. If you do some comparisons over at digitalversus you might get the idea that 120 Hz monitor have less ghosting (intentionally or not I do not know) but at the same time there are also models where ghosting seems just as bad.

Can you get used to the ghosting if you have to? Perhaps. But I’m sure as hell not taking the chance now. There will be no voluntary move to LCD here and as far as the TV is concerned I noticed LG introduced fast decay phosphor across their 3D compatible plasmas this year. Perhaps this will reduce the plasma equivalent to LCD ghosting, phosphor trailing.

The new fan is a lot better even if it is far from perfect. I don’t think I can expect more from a non-enthusiast model though. And there really isn’t much else to do in the 70 mm range. I remember reading a story on the Synology modding forum about a successful switch to a Papst 70 mm. But at the end of the day it didn’t really improve acoustics or cooling all that much. And they price tag was hefty. I was thinking about mounting a bigger fan externally on a fan adapter but aside from the fact that there aren’t any 70 mm adapters around these parts there is also the possibility of added noise sucking air through a tube.

At least it’s good to see that Synology has started to move away from the 70 mm disaster with the 92 mm equipped DS211+. Basically the upgrade increased the enclosure width and depth by no more than 10 mm respectively. I call that a more than acceptable trade-off.

The obvious downside is the lack of external antennas of course. Especially now that I got these monster antennas from TP-Link that I can’t use. Oh well. Looking at the glorious Tomato firmware GUI kind of makes up for everything. Also of course this is a gigabit router so I now have a much more solid connection to my new NAS. About five times faster in real world speeds. It’s about time. And thankfully, both the router and the power supply are completely silent so far.

Haven’t done any wireless test yet. I have a cheap wireless USB NIC (D-Link DWA-140) coming in any day now and we’ll see how it plays with the 3500L and the WDTV Live. I will also test the homeplug viability to find the best solution for the media streamer.

Now I can also RMA my D-Link 635. Finally. I figure it is at least worth the price of economy postage to get a new spare router. Even if it is an old and inflexible solution.

I did consider the alternatives but most we’re automatically disqualified on the basis of price alone. Popcorn Hour feels expensive as does Boxee. The former has excellent media support but you’re paying for an internal storage bay that you’re never gonna use. The latter is really overpriced, has 10 W standby power consumption, but also has a fancy remote and lots of potential. The next step up after that is a real HTPC. But I’ve been there and done that. Building HTPCs can be risky. They’re either astronomically expensive, noisy, slow to boot, underpowered or all of the above. Boxee, GoogleTV and whatnot is the future as they can keep HTPC prices down by cutting features (like internal storage) and getting the volumes up. But I’d hate to be an early adopter. I’d rather hold out for the second generation boxes. Also, we have several Fusion solutions from AMD coming out next year. Perhaps one of these chipsets will provide the basis for the perfect HTPC after all.

Another reason I was in such a rush to get a streamer was to be able to more easily test a future plasma / lcd TV. And to be able to run break-in slides on a plasma if that turns out to be the technology of choice.

So far I’ve just hooked it up to a CRT television (composite, oh yeah) to check the functionality. Another strange perk of the WDTV – it does support both component and composite output.

Power consumption seems fair, but like the Boxee, it lacks any sort of real standby mode. Measurements would indicate anything from 4-5 W power consumption. Again, like the Boxee, it doesn’t change much regardless of whether it’s in standby or streaming. Switching on the device is relatively snappy as long as it is in its fake standby mode. If you disconnect the power however, booting up will take well over a minute. Again, it’s the same thing with the Boxee from what I’ve been able to gather except it "only" takes about 30 seconds or so. Allegedly. I wouldn’t really know.

Format support seems good enough considering the price. Menus could be snappier but it takes just as long to open a 480p movie as it does a 1080p version. Remote is no success story as it is a tad too simple and mushy. On the other hand you can use USB keyboards with the latest firmware.

Speaking of firmwares this could very well be the Achilles’ heel of the WDTV. Western Digital has been slow to fix apparent problems and now ones seem to crop up with every release. Fortunately there is the WDLXTV project that maintains a stable alternative which adds many  sought after features like NFS support and Youtube HD. Haven’t gotten around to try this yet though. But the important thing is that there is some sort of development going on.

Creating a new volume took about 10.5 hours most of which was spent error checking the 2TB drive. Probably time well spent.

I thought long and hard about CIFS (SMB) vs. NFS vs. iSCSI but in the end I dropped iSCSI for two simple reasons. Formatting a portion of a Linux based NAS volume as NTFS seemed wonky and I saw basically no compatibility in any media streamers / extenders. Ironically I did get it working in Windows 7. Unlike NFS which was a real disaster. Regardless, you have the option to choose between SMB and NFS at your leisure and for now SMB is just fine. Ironically, it will probably be easier to set up on a media streamer than under Windows. I can’t speak of transfer speeds since I don’t have a Gigabit router yet.

Build quality: A bit underwhelming to be honest. Looks and feels cheap and plasticky. Noise bearable but not impressive. I noticed a slight rattling coming from the fan, at least at some speeds. Fan is 70 mm as previously noted. A real idiotic choice as there are virtually no replacement fans available. Obviously they should have made the case a few millimetres wider and fitted an 80 mm fan instead. But since Synology still made the same mistake with the DS211 you can hardly make the case for an updated model. I will do some more tests on the fan and power consumption down the line.

Noise and cooling: Unimpressive. But expected given the 70 mm fan. A Papst replacement fan would be $30 or so which doesn’t make any sense. And it wont really be much quieter or provide better cooling. The factory fan is also impossible to mount on rubber washers because of the snug fit. The thinner Papst might be possible. Some people have tried mounting the fan on the outside to increase cooling. At any rate, the fan in my NAS was out of balance and created one hell of a racket in terms of resonance inside the case. Ironically the racket was actually worse in hibernation as the fan slows down. I have contacted Synology and they graciously agreed to send me a new fan. We’ll see how that goes.

Hard drives: As for hard drives I picked up another Samsung F4 (HD204UI) 2TB drive to get me started. Probably the best 2 TB drive at the moment plus it does work with the NAS. When the dust has settled down I will move my other F4 to the NAS enclosure as well. I did say that I wasn’t going to add a second drive but I realized that populating the DS209 right away would  be a much better approach. Installing and formatting the drives one at a time will allow me to safely move the data and get everything up and running. When I’m done I’ll have 4 TB of cosy storage for all my high definition movies and whatnot. And I’ll be rid of one at least one drive from my main rig. Will save me some noise and vibration on this end. Edit: Oops. Turns out the HD204UI needs a firmware upgrade to keep it from causing a potentially disastrous error. Not something NAS specific though.

File sharing: Running transmission (torrents) and sabnzbd (usenet). It’s a mixed bag as expected. Downloading using the DS209 is not a priority task so I did some quick and dirty benchmarks. Torrents worked better than expected. Except for the web interface which didn’t load half of the time. Probably some install problem. Anyway, I picked an Ubuntu image file and it downloaded quite easily. Maxed out my bandwidth anyway. About 20 Mbit / s at 45 % CPU load. Constant speed, no hiccups. Usenet was a different story though, SSL or no SSL. I could max out the connection but the CPU would hit 90-98%. The unpacking of course took ages. It’s the Python process that hogs all the resources and several other users on the Synology board have reported the same crappy performance. Some have suggested switching to Nzbget which also has an experimental web interface. But for the time being I’ll keep using the much faster external system.

I also ended up doing some real world tests on real world torrents. Anime stuff mostly that isn’t available on Usenet. OZC HD season packs of Gundam 00 Second Season, Black Lagoon, Code Geass etc. Not very impressive speeds from the tracker but a good test of the DS209′s long-term abilities nonetheless. I was able to queue up a dozen or so episodes using the watch folder and download them overnight. Any and all irregularities, like the wonky download queue, were clearly inherent problems with the Transmission client. It isn’t utorrent, that’s for sure. For rare to find and slow files that you have to go on bittorrent to download and that might take days to complete, it feels good to have an exceptionally quiet and energy efficient solution chipping away at the problem. For everything else there is usenet.

Encryption: Has some sort of hardware encryption engine, but allegedly slows the transfer speeds dramatically. Fast Ethernet kind of slow. Also unsure of how secure it would really be. My suggestion would be to create a Truecrypt container on a shared volume and mount the container. All problems solved and besides I wouldn’t recommend encrypting entire volumes anyway. I suspect it will take ages and who would want to encrypt every single file anyway?

Transfer speeds: Using F4 drives. A mixed bag. I get around 48 MB / s writing a 100 MB file using LAN Speed Test. SMB/CIFS no Jumbo frames. But I only get around 30 MB / s reading it back. Same basic result when copying or moving files using teracopy. Clearly something is amiss here. Write speeds are good and I can expect nothing more since I use CIFS and no RAID, but read speeds have been better than write speeds in every single benchmark I have ever seen on any type of NAS. Except this one. Either it’s a CIFS / Win 7 issue, or it is something specific with the F4 drives. I should try to do some NFS and FTP speed tests.

Power consumption: Pending. Expect it to be around 10 W hibernation and 16 W spinning with two F4 drives. 20 W with full CPU load. Not brilliant but good enough.

Other custom packages: Haven’t tried much else except for the above.

So this is another step towards limited redundancy. I also have a Corsair 550VX PSU in storage. And if I can find a new (or used) router I will probably RMA the 635 and use the replacement as a spare.

Also, I need to replace the wireless mouse on workstation 2. It is old, low-DPI, has a real iffy scroll wheel that is neither good at scrolling or clicking and most importantly it picks up interference from the homeplug network. Wireless would be preferable since mouse placement does not favour cables and since this is not a gaming computer.