Fast 4 bay NAS with RAID01/10

I'm looking for a fast 4 bay desktop NAS to do something like RAID01 or RAID10 with 4 1Tb drives, I wanted to keep speed way up because I will have a small design team of about 6 people on a bunch of Macs all reading/writing large source art files that pretty big, upto 50mb each, they do this reguarly all day and are fed up of slow speeds off our small business server

I also wanted some redundancy because the work is important so can't have drives dying and wiping out the RAID. I would prefer RAID01 a strippred array also mirrored, as something like RAID 5 seems to suffer write speed slowdown due to the overhead of writing parity data.

I looked at the QNAP range which seem quite fast but they don't support multi-level raid RAID01/10 so looked at cheaper variants like the Seagate Blackarmor 440 but they apparantly aren't that fast...is there any other decent products anyone can recommend? I would rather spend a bit more on a good 4 bay NAS and get good speeds.

There are reviews on some at SmallNetBuilder.

The only other one so far I've found with RAID01 is Synology DS411+ which seems like maybe it's a bit faster for read/write with decent drives.

I've checked various reviews, but it's hard to compare these products like this, I was hoping for some real world experience with them from other users.

I understand your reasons for you wanting a NAS, but why not build a cheap PC based on a inexpensive intel processor, and setup RAID on the integrated ICH controller? I've heard good things about Intel's chipset implimentation of RAID, and it would guarentee performance unlike different flavors of NAS devices.

Time, effort and money really, I need a quick cheap(ish) way of upgrading our design teams storage space and keeping it speedy without busting the bank or needing me to spend any significant time setting it up.

I went for the Synology variant in the end, it supports RAID01 and seems to have a lot of good features, although some reviews have fairly average speeds with it, it's also pretty reasonable price wise.

What about the QNAP TS-410U?
http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_hardware.asp?p_id=137

PrincessFrosty said:

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I also wanted some redundancy because the work is important so can't have drives dying and wiping out the RAID. I would prefer RAID01 a stripped array also mirrored, as something like RAID 5 seems to suffer write speed slowdown due to the overhead of writing parity data.
*snip*

Click to expand...

Since I didn't see it mentioned yet always remember that RAID is not a replacement for backups. about 6 months ago I had a little NAS box die, in almost identical circumstances (design team for a printing company even) and took half the data with it. Thankfully most of the data was backed up here and there but they still lost about 40gigs worth of work because they thought they didn't need a backup of it because it was redundant. Don't get burned by that.

If you still want to stay on the cheap the easiest solution is to buy 2 of the NAS boxes and use one to copy the other.

What about eBOX-N can do 80M/sec on raid5?

Look at the end user testimonial