Friday, March 27, 2015

Out with the Old

So, part of the reason for this blog is that I recently bought a new Synology DiskStation DS215j to replace my 4-year-old DS211j. (Side note: my old 211j just sold on eBay for just over $100, without drives - so those things really hold value!)

As with all things IT, the newer units have more horsepower and more RAM.  Now, mind you, the wonderful thing about Linux is that you can run it on an appliance like the DS and only need 512MB RAM.  That's still amazing to me.  My newest work laptop has 12GB of RAM (GB!)- and I still bump into that limit.  Of course - that's because I have dozens of Chrome tabs open all the time - but that's another story.

The DS211j has a single ARMv5 CPU (The Marvell Kirkwood mv6281 - to be precise http://www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/kirkwood/assets/88F6281-004_ver1.pdf ) and only 128MB RAM.  It wasn't the fastest thing ever, but it did what I wanted it to.

The DS215j is a dual-core ARMv7 CPU (Marvell Armada 375  http://www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada-300/assets/ARMADA_375_SoC-01_product_brief.pdf ) and 512 MB RAM.  The Armada 375 System on a Chip (SoC) also includes an onboard Floating Point Unit (FPU) for heavy math-intensive processing and also support for the NEON extended set of instructions.  I'm not 100% on the NEON capability, but the FPU is a big deal, particularly for things like audio/video transcoding.

I guess that gets to the question of "why do I have a DiskStation?" and "why would I want to do custom dev work on a DiskStation?"  Most of what I bought the DiskStation for, I can do with the standard packages available from Synology:

  • Backup for all the PCs in the house
  • Shared storage of all the family pictures and video
  • iTunes Server for shared family music
  • DLNA/Media Server, which means all the stored pictures/music/video can be played back on any DLNA device in the house (PS3, "smart" TV, etc)

About a couple years ago, I heard about SickBeard and SABnzbd.  Of course, they had been around for awhile, but I had no idea.  By that time, I figured, like a lot of people, that we were paying way too much for cable TV that we rarely watched. So - no more cable TV.  Of course, Comcast is still getting our money since that's currently the fastest Internet provider in our area (c'mon Google Fiber - hurry up!!)

So, now some new things got added to the list of things running on the DiskStation:
  • Sickbeard
  • SABnzbd
  •  ... and ...
And the "and" part is where it gets interesting.  Shows that you pull via Sickbeard come in a variety of formats/containers.  And not all of those containers play well with all the devices that you may want to watch a show on (I'm looking at you, PS3).  So - that means you have to transcode the file to make it watchable on all devices.  That means running something else to do that transcoding.  I'll get to that next.

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