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Computer Geeks - looking for NAS advice

#2
Buffalo is to be avoided. Their stuff is typically crap, at least on the NAS side of things.

Do *not* go for a Dobro either. They're slow as hell and use a proprietary RAID-emulation layer which encrypts your files. Too many Dobros just plain die a quick death and the files stored on the HDs can't be rescued as a result of the encryption.

For a good NAS, your 2 major players are Synology and QNAP.

QNAP has a huge load of handy utilities for their NAS devices programmed by regular people like you & me. If you plan on doing loads of tweaking and using every possible capability, the QNAP devices are impossible to beat.

Synology has a different philosophy that caters more towards the user who doesn't want to fiddle around too much, even though their products also have a wide range of capabilities and possibilities. But the ease-of-use and the intuitive 1st-time setup are painless and quick.

I personally went with a Synology DS411 : Invalid Link Removed

I do regret it one bit.

HOWEVER!!

Remember the following since most people forget ;

- You need a gigabit NIC on any/every PC in order to benefit from the transfer speed.
- You also need a gigabit router.

Otherwise, transfer speeds will have a ceiling of roughly 28mbps. Transferring, say, gigs of data will take a loooong time.
 
#3
Also, be advised that when you format/prep the HDs within the NAS that it'll take hours & hours. I had 3tb and 4tb drives. It took more than 50h to have this done.

THIS IS NORMAL! Don't be alarmed or concerned.
 
#5
Strat-Mangler said:
Do *not* go for a Dobro either. They're slow as hell and use a proprietary RAID-emulation layer which encrypts your files. Too many Dobros just plain die a quick death and the files stored on the HDs can't be rescued as a result of the encryption.
Click to expand...

Interdesting... Presuming you mean "Drobo", I was just at a 3-day summit of studio & home-theater designers, and one of these guys was just raving about how cool it was.
 
#6
Strat-Mangler said:
Buffalo is to be avoided. Their stuff is typically crap, at least on the NAS side of things.

Do *not* go for a Dobro either. They're slow as hell and use a proprietary RAID-emulation layer which encrypts your files. Too many Dobros just plain die a quick death and the files stored on the HDs can't be rescued as a result of the encryption.

For a good NAS, your 2 major players are Synology and QNAP.

QNAP has a huge load of handy utilities for their NAS devices programmed by regular people like you & me. If you plan on doing loads of tweaking and using every possible capability, the QNAP devices are impossible to beat.

Synology has a different philosophy that caters more towards the user who doesn't want to fiddle around too much, even though their products also have a wide range of capabilities and possibilities. But the ease-of-use and the intuitive 1st-time setup are painless and quick.

I personally went with a Synology DS411 : Invalid Link Removed

I do regret it one bit.

HOWEVER!!

Remember the following since most people forget ;

- You need a gigabit NIC on any/every PC in order to benefit from the transfer speed.
- You also need a gigabit router.

Otherwise, transfer speeds will have a ceiling of roughly 28mbps. Transferring, say, gigs of data will take a loooong time.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the insights. I've been using a cheap Netgear NAS for a while now, and I really want to move to something safer and more robust all the way around. I'll check out Synology.
 
#12
Strat-Mangler said:
Ah, yes. The amazing 1-word supposed be-all and end-all of answers, regardless of the different needs for everybody. I also enjoy these replies considering zero info is shared nor the advantages of using this versus a typical NAS.

Unless a few power-users are reading this, a regular NAS will do just fine, thank you.
Click to expand...

It writes directly to disk, and is as fast as a hard drive directly connected to the machine you're using. Check out a Iomega StorCenter.... it provides both a NFS share, and an iSCSI target... IOMega is owned and fully designed by EMC.. and the iSCSI client is free from microsoft, google it.
 

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