A challenge: Synology DS412+ network adapter of ≥2.5 GbE

Networking
1

TL;DR: The title says it all.

I have a DS412+. It has a single USB 2.0 port on the front and two USB 3.0 ports on the rear. Both USB 3.0 ports and the eSATA port are part of a PCIe card in a PCIe x4 slot. That slot is capable of 8Gbps at best per the standard (I think it’s PCIe 1.0, might be better). I’d really like to get a ≥2.5Gb network adapter to work with this NAS. The first option that came to mind was a USB 3.0 adapter like the Cable Creation CD0673. It’s a USB 3.0 type A to 2.5GBase-T adapter. Reddit u/bb-qq posted this driver for such devices a few months ago. That driver, however, is for apollo lake Synology products.

The DS412+ hardware can be seen in extensive detail here: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/synology-ds412plus/5.html

If I had to, I’d be willing to replace the PCIe card with a PCIe NIC capable of 5GBase-T. I really only need one USB port (which would become the front port) for connecting to the uninterruptible power supply. That is my last resort, though, as I’ll probably have to hack the case up a good bit to do that, and even then I’m not sure if it’ll be supported.

Does anyone out there know how best to achieve this goal?

2

Hey,

(Sorry to resurrect this thread from the grave)

I was going to wait for the next generation of 4-Bay Synology NAS to support some form of faster Ethernet (2.5 fine, 5 great) out of the box. But nope, despite the obvious bottleneck of the 1G NIC, Synology in their ultimate wisdom decided against it.

So I decided to squeeze my 412+ a little bit longer until Synology comes to their senses.

While upgrading the RAM i discovered said PCIe Slot and was wondering the EXACT same thing :slight_smile:

So, did you get anywhere with your project?

Thanks and have a nice day.

3

I was researching options for this recently, and using a USB3.0 to 2.5/5.0 Gbps ethernet adaptor seems a viable now as well. This synology community thread led me to these 2 driver packages on github.
Realtek based ethernet adaptors - https://github.com/bb-qq/r8152
Aquantia based ethernet adaptors - https://github.com/bb-qq/aqc111

Not sure if the 412 would work, but hopefully someone finds this helpful.

4

Hey! Sorry I missed your reply in July. I was work with bb-qq for a while to get this working per this thread: https://github.com/bb-qq/r8152/issues/7 Please pick-up the torch in that thread so that we can collaborate. Unfortunately life has caught up with me and I do not have time to dedicate to this endevor at the moment. What I can tell you is that it’s going to be an uphill climb to get it onto my network using SFP+ devices. If you have a router that supports RJ45-based ≥2.5Gbps then the USB adapter with bb-qq’s driver seems like it will work.

Worth noting that Synology have finally rolled out 10GBase-T (RJ45) built-in to their high-end desktop form factors. The DS1621xs+ is the cheapest unit and it starts at $1.6k as a bare-bones unit… :confused: I hope they have a more reasonable offering next year but really doubt it. I’m not buying one until it’s less than half that with built-in 10GbE. And if my DS dies then I’m upgrading to a custom build with Xpenology or Ubuntu Server so I’m not locked into this BS again.