Best NAS solution? (1 Viewer)

Beechus

Portal Pro
January 29, 2008
73
2
Middlands
Home Country
England England
Hey people,

I'm looking at buying a NAS device for my home. My main problem is i hate having external drives plugged into a machine which are not RAID.

My basic requirements are:

4 bays
RAID
NAS (Gigabit)

I've seen a couple of items, such as the Drobo (Data Robotics, Inc.) and the EdgeStore (Amazon.co.uk: EdgeStore 4 bay NAS Chassis: Electronics & Photo) but i was looking for something more affordable.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
Tom
 

SweMart

MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • March 25, 2006
    359
    11
    46
    Stockholm, Sweden
    Home Country
    Sweden Sweden
    Have a look at the D-Link DNS-343, not sure when they will release it in Europe though:
    D-Link DNS-343 4-Bay Network Storage Enclosure

    It fills all of your requirements.

    I have the 2 bay model(DNS-323) which absolutely kicks ass, you can really easily mod it by adding Linux software to it. On my NAS box I run the following services:
    - lighttpd with php
    - FTP/TLS server
    - Normal Windows filesharing
    - UPNP DLNA server which lets me stream my videos to my PS3/Xbox360

    The D-Link DNS-3X3 NAS boxes have a fairly big community as well, see the links below:
    DSM-G600, DNS-323 and TS-I300 Hack Forum
    start - DNS323Wiki
     

    Bagal

    MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • December 15, 2006
    229
    16
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    Check out the NAS Performance charts on smallnetbuilder, which is something I wish I'd seen before I bought my Thecus N4100+.

    The problem with *afforadable* 4 bay NASes is that they tend to have week embedded processors that can't handle the throughput and they also get worse when you add Raid to the equation. Even though most of them come with gigabit ethernet, you'll never get anywhere near gigabit transfer speeds.

    When I first got the Thecus, at best I was getting 8Mbps read and 4Mbps write across a gigabit network with Cat6 cables, tried lots of things including jumbo frames and it never got any better. Recently I purchased some Intel PRO/1000 GT network adapters for all my machines, enabled jumbo frames and now I'm getting 20Mbps reads and 10Mbps writes so I'm much happier than I was, but this is still well below the PC-to-PC transfers I get (around 45Mbps write).

    From the smallnetbuilder charts and from what I've been reading recently, the Synology cube station CS407 looks like a good buy, beware the cheaper CS407e though which has a weaker processor and hence will suffer from the same throughput problems!

    Bagal.
     

    Seattle

    Portal Pro
    August 21, 2008
    56
    2
    Home Country
    Germany Germany
    Buy

    Hi there,

    buy a synology an you´ll see that´s the greatest deal in your life...

    SEA
     

    mcbelly

    MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • June 29, 2006
    190
    5
    Home Country
    Germany Germany
    I´ve been using NAS Devices for some time now and there`s one suggestion I can give: don´t .

    They are not really performant and are mostly just standing around doing nothing.

    About a year ago, I switched to a real server (w2003) and I´m really happy about it. Fast, silent and uses less energy than my five NAS devices did. And you can use the server for several other things, you can`t use a NAS for. Extending space is no longer a problem, just put in a new disk (replace one or add one) and you're done.

    So my suggestion is: use a server, you can get one for about the same money...
     

    weissollo

    MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • March 2, 2007
    200
    7
    Franken
    Home Country
    Germany Germany

    Eeyore

    Portal Pro
    April 2, 2006
    260
    4
    Newcastle, Australia
    Home Country
    i've researched this quite a bit, and i am going to buy a Drobo. the main reason is online expansion.

    with the drobo, when the disks are full, just pull out one and insert a new drive of larger capacity and the drobo expands the array automatically. it will support up to 4x 4TB drives for 12TB of usable raid space.

    I have 4x 1TB drives at the moment, and just waiting for my performance bonus so i can buy it.
     

    karlc_uk1979

    New Member
    April 6, 2009
    3
    0
    I've just been through this myself. I looked at products from Buffalo,Synology,Thecus,Drobo & Netgear. I've ended up with the Synology CS407, and I'm very pleased with it. The sugguestion to look at the NAS performance charts is exactly what I did, and I found the synology box to be the fastest at reasonable cost. Home NAS boxes tend to be slow performers.

    Personally I think the Drobo isn't that great. By default it isn't actually a nas, without the DroboShare. Combined it costs about £550, which I think is pretty exspensive, as the CS407 is about £350, and has better performance over the network.

    The online exspansion isn't limited to the Drobo either. My Synology can grow on to bigger disks, and the other manufacturers has similiar things such as X-Raid which allows you do something simliar. I think the Drobo probably handles different disk sizes more efficiently, but most people recommend using the same disks in a nas box for consistancy and performance reasons. These days £200 will buy you a lot of new hard disks.

    cheers

    Karl
     

    ryan20021982

    Retired Team Member
  • Premium Supporter
  • June 27, 2008
    655
    86
    USA
    Home Country
    United States of America United States of America
    I dont understand why people buy a nas over building a home file server.

    Most of those above are $400-$500 without hard drives, thats nuts. Just build a system and the hdds and connect it to the network.
     

    Gixxer

    Retired Team Member
  • Premium Supporter
  • August 18, 2007
    1,383
    41
    39
    Spain
    Home Country
    Spain Spain
    I dont understand why people buy a nas over building a home file server.

    Most of those above are $400-$500 without hard drives, thats nuts. Just build a system and the hdds and connect it to the network.

    thats what i did !! also because i wanted multiseat tvserver, torrent, and a few other things.

    i guess people buy that because its plug and play and u dont have to do the raid yourself. I must admit i have not got into raid yet but because i dont have enough harddrives.
     

    Users who are viewing this thread

    Top Bottom