Ten... two-bay Nas boxes
Network attached storage is the panacea for many of today’s data excesses, especially you’ve developed a music and movie habit, need a backup server or fancy your own personal cloud. Two-bay nas drives are an affordable option for file sharing, supporting mixed platform environments in addition to web HTTP and FTP services. …
This topic is closed for new posts.
IntelliPower != variable RPM
That's the common misconception regarding WDC GreenPower drives. InteliiPower does not mean the RPM is variable - even WD doesn't suggest this anywhere. It's the WD's way of telling you the RPM is tuned for cool and quiet operation - not performance, without telling you the exact figure so you won't be put off by comparing it directly against other drives. Somebody some time ago measured it to be somewhere within the 5900RPM range for some previous models but this could vary from model to model.
D-Link doesn't sell in the UK?
I've got the D-Link DNS-325, and I'm quite happy with it. I'd love to know though how it stacks up against the competition...
Re: D-Link doesn't sell in the UK?
yes they do, see Scan etc.
£90
Re: D-Link doesn't sell in the UK?
They do the DNS-320 for £51.
Might not be the fastest but for backups or just streaming to a mediaplayer they do the job. I currently have 3 of them on my network all running in Raid 1.
DIY is the only way
Old acer power f6 with an intel dual core 1.86 chip and 2 gig of ram. With 4x2TB drives on a RAID5 giving 5.46TB. All sitting on ubuntu server etc etc.
Nicked the whole lot from work. total cost 0
Green Power
Hey those with DIY custom jobs and being a bit tw*tish....tell me you've checked your electricity bills recently if you have it on 24/7. 100 quid saving for same for a quality Nas. (And don't say S3 wakeon coz that means players are not ready to see it). Now choke on that that.
Re: Green Power
Actually, I have one of those DIY custom jobs, and don't feel like a twat in any sense. Power bill or no power bill. Being a PC with lots of cores, lots of ram and an obscene amount of storage space, I have one VM taking care of my NAS needs, then a domain controller, sandbox VMs for testing potentially malware infected files, dedicated minecraft server VM, development and testing VMs for my software dev work, all sorts of things.
Basically I consolidated a lot of functions I would use different servers for into a single box, saving more power than would be gained by buying some little underpowered consumer level piece of kit meant for the non techie.
Basically I consolidated a lot of functions I would use different servers for into a single box,
Yeah but you have to admit a lot of those functions are pretty lame. I bought a 4 bay synology to replace the lots of ram, lots of cores tower i was using and now i spend much more time having fun than dicking around with servers.
Re: Basically I consolidated a lot of functions I would use different servers for into a single box,
Fun is a relative term, your idea of fun is quite possibly completely different to my idea of fun.
I enjoy "dicking around" with servers, virtualisation, development and even the odd game of Minecraft. Sure, I could slap a few commodity drives in a consumer level piece of NAS kit and call it a tree hugging day. But for me, where's the fun in that. Hell, for shits and giggles, I put a 22U server rack and a comms cabinet in my laundry (coldest room in the house) and ran at least 2 CAT6 ethernet ports into each room. For no other reason than I enjoyed wiring and setting it all up.
Sure, maybe some of the stuff running on it might be considered lame, but I have about 15 VMs with different Windows versions, Service Pack levels, and many other differences, it's an invaluable resource for my software QA process.
Basically, I consolidated about 5 separate boxes into a single powerful box running a virtualised environment, saved a huge chunk on my power bill and greenhouse emissions, and I am still having as much fun as I was with the 5 separate boxes. If that makes me (and others like me) a twat then so be it.
Re: Basically I consolidated a lot of functions I would use different servers for into a single box,
ffs....I do that for a living.........If I want to dick around, I remote into a server room ;)
Re: Basically I consolidated a lot of functions I would use different servers for into a single box,
Yeah, I could too if I wanted but they are all production boxes and "dicking around" on them is rather risky.
Point being, sure for you a little NAS box ticks all the right boxes, for others it doesn't and they want another more custom option that suits their needs better. So why does that make them twats and why does it really make a lick of difference to you?
Re: Green Power
That's why I bought a NAS box - I worked out the hardware outlay would save me enough money in power bills within about 18months to justify going for the NAS over a recycled PC in the corner, particularly as my old PCs were fairly power hungry being ex-gaming rigs.
I'm tempted to get a Raspberry Pi with two USB drives to replace it, though; the downside is the disk performance over USB is likely to suck and the added power draw for the drive enclosures won't help.
Re: Green Power
I switched to an mini-ITX form factor always-on server: a dual-core Atom with a pair of 2.5" laptop drives in a £30 off ebay small form factor case. I have a Wifi router int he same box which steals power from a drive bay. Total outlay was about £120 and running tweaked-a-bit Ubuntu server, quiescent power draw is near enough 18W, or £18 a year in electric.
I plan to replace the PSU with a SLA battery and trickle charger one day as a sort of poor man's UPS, Google tea tray server style.
Re: Green Power
You may have already thought about this, but you need to float a gel cell at something like 13.5V and if your computer is expecting a regulated, bang on 12 that's not going to happen.
I've got some 24V kit at work running of a couple of 12V SLAs from CPC and I'm quite impressed. They're baby 1.2Ah ones and when I accidentally left the system on batteries overnight (it's a Mitsubish Micro PLC doodah and a GSM modem monitoring all sorts of things round the place) the battery voltage was still at 25.5 in the morning.
uServer Format
Glad to see HP getting stitched for all those 100 quid rebates. The Microserver/8GB RAM + VMware ESXi combo is most effective. The rebate paid for the RAM upgr. Alongside FreeNAS I can run Win7 with iTunes as a VM to stream out to Airport Express remote audio outputs plus an Ubuntu VM running Serviio, a very nice DNLA server for my Bravia TV & the young uns PS3.
Web GUI is important
I should know, I have been struggling with the Thecus N2200Plus for about a year. From the look of it the N2200EVO uses the same GUI. On the N2200Plus half the icons don't work. Until the recent firmware update on some pages there were more data fields than screen space and no horizontal scrolling bar. The fixed this in the latest release by shrinking the fields so you can only some of the text.
The GUI also takes ages to load. There is a heart-stopping moment when you click on the RAID icon to view the raid array. You get a pop-up box saying 'Please Wait' and a about a minute later the display is refreshed with all the column heading but no RAID array information. After a while another pop-up box appears with 'Please Wait' and then the raid array information is finally revealed.
There's lots of other issues with the N2200Plus but I won't go into them here. Suffice it to say that it has just corrupted the file system for the third and last time. I'm hoping that Thecus tech support can recover the data again. Either way it is going to be replaced with the Synology DS212j.
After my experiences with the Thecus product I really don't rate them as a company. The documentation for the product contains errors, the product has lots of known bugs, firmware updates are infrequent and don't have release notes. The best one was releasing a beta firmware - v3.02.00.9 - to users who were experiencing a particular bug. The next official release after the beta was v3.02.00.8 with no way for beta users to downgrade.
However, I take my hat off to the european Thecus Tech support guys (2 of them I think). They have always been helpful and polite. Its just a shame it is such a crap product.
Meh.
In the distant past, I acquired a full-sized enclosed rack. A year ago I got tired of chasing down whatever DVD contained the movie I wanted to watch, I decided to build myself a rack-mount file-server. The wife agreed (she understands my need to do these crazy things) but only under the proviso I build the biggest one I could.
I live in Australia, so the ready-made products available down here are few and far between (or at least, they were back then - haven't looked lately) and I have to work against the usual price gauging when it comes to IT, but...
I eventually built myself a 4U i5 9x2TB RAID-5 1GbE file-server (plus one 250Mb HDD for the filesystem). By the time you take the 1024->1000 conversion factor and RAID-5 into account, it left me with a useable 14TB of drive-space. I also installed a TV capture card and MythTV back-end on it, but that was a bonus. Total price: about $2,200 (drives included) or roughly £1,400 at today's rates.
Still haven't found a decent rack-mounted drive-farm (with or without HDDs) for that price. But if you know of one, let me know... I'm looking to expand. ^_^
Benchmarks please
This summary reads like someones taken the brochures and some anecdotal commentary and drafted up this article.
Can we please have some more informed data including at least (using the same HDD when the choice is given):
1. sustained throughtput - read and write - with one or multiple users
2. power consumption when idle
3. noise level when idle
These devices - and I have an aging ReadyNAS NV+ - are meant to run 24/7 in a "home" environment, so the last two are as important as the first.
Certainly the QNAP does (I own one), and I'd be very surprised if the Synology didn't as well. The QNAP and Synology ones are the most polished, but also quite expensive for what you get.
That being said, the new 2GHz Marvells are fast enough to run quite a lot of things. I run Logitech's Squeezebox Server and Serviio for streaming music and video, respectively, with nary a hiccough. (Runs the printer, too. But I don't think that takes much oomph.) The only time I've seen the little ARM chip choke was on a live HD stream in a format that needed to be transcoded. But even the Atom-based ones can choke on transcoding live HD streams.
By the way, I'm quite technically competent. But what I don't have is tons of spare time and a lot of room. The QNAP makes perfect sense and sips a fraction of the juice a home-made solution would anyhow. It'll even do a quasi-transactional database for writes, somewhat like ZFS. But unlike ZFS there's quite a write speed penalty for it (it roughly halves write speed). But since I have a toddler who thinks power switches are fun, it's worth it to have the disks re-sync in 30s instead of a few hours.
I've got one of these - a DLink one - didnt see it in the lineup.
But i've learned it takes months of pissing about and reading forums to get all the nuiances and extra features working - so well done for doing that on 10 of them
Zyxel NSA221
Paid £50 for a Zyxel NSA221, okay, it's only single core and it can be very slow to write (I copied 25GB of Photos and video yesterday and it took about 5 hours over a wireless n network), but the read speeds are very good, I can stream HD movies to my PS3 whilst playing MP3's on my squeezebox radio. For £400 I'd buy something like the HP Proliant microserver and bung big RAID configured drives in it rather than having a NAS.
Re: Zyxel NSA221
I think I picked one of the single bay versions up for a customer for around £60 with a 500GB HDD in it. They wanted a USB HDD but for £10 extra and as I was setting it up for them why not.
I explained to them what it was and what it did and they were quite impressed, especially as it could be hidden behind the TV where the Virgin router box was rather than on their office desk.
Compared to a lot of NAS boxes was surprised how easy it was to setup. Had it set up and running a Cobian backup in less than 10 minutes from switch on. Done and dusted.
Interesting Stufff,...
interesting review,... what do you know about 5-Bay USB3/eSata Raid boxes ?
re: green power
the number of fucks about the NAS's green credentials given = 0
DS212+
I had specificed a small server to give me Raid 5, but issues around uncertainty for what would be needed in the future led to a rethink and I accepted a 500Tb RAID 1 DS212+.
Currently its functioning as a simple fileserver. I've not needed half the extra bits it can do (email, remote access, streaming, torrent etc etc) so I can't comment on them.
One thing I don't care for is that Domain integration means copying user domain credentials to a local store rather than querying the domain.
It's quiet, setup quickly, and has been working faultlessly since I got it.
If I had the money, I'd have one for a home NAS, though for reliable data availability in a business situation I'd rather have three disks and twin power supplies.
Real Review
I want to know the power consumption, the expandability, the ease of drive replacement and what protocols they support, as well as the speed and price. Also the number of complaints/bugs.
Next time write a REAL review!
I didn't go down the DIY route but did buy a Zyxel NSA310 which was populated with a 2TB WD green jobbie for £109. Okay, it's single enclosure but it's still cheaper than most of the unpopulated two bays here.
+1 for Synology
I've had a 209+ii, and a 1010+, the 1010+ is a beast, a proper workhorse. I hammer it constantly.
Software updates are pretty frequent, and the beta of 4 includes a new 'SynoCloud' feature thingy.
Think dropbox, but everything syncs to your nas instead of some random dropbox server somewhere. It's a bit crap at the moment - last time I checked, you couldn't sync files over a certain size, making it a bit useless for me, but that will (hopefully) get sorted before the final release.
I'd love to 'upgrade' to one of those new 10/12 bay models!
This topic is closed for new posts.
