Shrinking market doesn't scare the NASty boys of storage The network-attached storage market appears to have shrunk slightly, but it seems that Buffalo, Seagate and Overland think the market's set to grow soon. There has been quite a bit of NAS action of late, with Buffalo pushing out a new product, Seagate spinning out a pair of rackmount NAS shelves, and Overland introducing one …
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http://www.seagate.com/external-hard-drives/network-storage/business/business-storage-8-bay-rackmount-nas/?intcmp=bac_br_h_pt_business-storage-8-bay-rackmount-nas
"What’s In the Box?
[..]
Seagate USB key with NAS OS"
I hope that's just to install the NAS OS, and not run the NAS OS off a $5 piece of flash that has no redundancy.
While I'm here does anyone know of a place that rates USB flash quality? Every review etc that I have come across only seems to care about performance, never quality. Perhaps quality is just hard to judge, perhaps the flash brand/model# is difficult(or impossible) to extract from the parts themselves to determine the source.
I don't know - but unlike the fairly mature drive market(there are bad ones here and there of course) the quality(and even performance) deltas are just massive - which would be fine if there was an easy way to determine which is which.. but there doesn't seem to be.
Seagate Blackarmor NAS line left such a shitty taste in my mouth that it would be a waste of a barge pole to even touch these products.
Buffalo may be slightly better (than Seagate) but their ISCSI/NAS products have frustratingly slow web UIs, poor performance in multiuser scenarios and I just don't trust these products that much. Every time I've asked something from their support they give you the runaround answers and I've never had the patience to follow all the frankly idiotic suggestions to get to even second tier support. For example, apparently OSX users can create files/folders with AFP that they (nor any admin user) can modify afterwards. "Just reformat that multi-TB NAS in production use, not that a big deal"
It may not be easier to setup a basic server with DASD, but it sure is more solid performer.
Is the Overland NAS business any good? How about the other NAS players, Thecus, QNAP and so on?
I've got a Thecus N7700+ from a few years ago.
Runs some kind of linux 2.6 from flash, has a nice lot of modules, supports iscsi, and i've seen reports of people upgrading the CPU from a celery to a dual core something or other and increasing the RAM from 2 to 3 gb.
I might do this at some point to increase the performance.
I've got 7 x 2gb WD "Green Power" drives in it, running RAID5 and encryption, and it's great.
Max read rates are ~50mb/sec for me, which isn't bad I think from an encrypted ZFS drive and software raid (there's 2 marvell RAID cards in there running md).
The interface isn't great - it uses flash (yuk), and the "English" can be a bit confusing, esp. if you're hesitating about swapping a failed drive, but from a HW point of view, I love it.
Encryption's great as you just boot it with a usb stick with the key stored on it, and then remove it once booted.
I've had 2 drive failures, and swapping them has been dead easy, although at 2tb each, rebuilds take around a day.
I'm seriously thinking of getting another one, and you can connect 15 of them together with iSCSI, which is nice.
They are doing rack mount beasties now up to 16 drives, which is good too, the only problem is their newer offerings don't support ZFS as far as I can tell, which is a real shame, and they are starting to include HDMI and audio ports, which is a bit pointless for a NAS, IMO.
I guess they are just using standard motherboards so don't have much choice.
What with the NSA and GCHQ wilfully snooping through our data, it wouldn't surprise me if the NAS market has a breath of new life. Transmit and store all your data to some compromised third party cloud service - or store it nice and securely on your own private disk. Surely a no brainer.
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