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Desktop NAS Recommendations?

djoye

djoye

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 31, 2004
Messages
3,179
I'm looking for a 2-4 bay desktop NAS. I've been browsing Newegg and the reviews on these types of devices are kinda scary. Are these people that just don't know how to work with the device or are desktop NAS'es really that rough?

Do you have to spend a lot to get something good? I've only been looking at units $300 and less; diskless.
 
Look at the reviews with a grain of salt.

If your pissed are you more likely to go online and vent about it on the site you bought it from vs if it work you forget all about the review no?
 
Shockey said:
Look at the reviews with a grain of salt.

If your pissed are you more likely to go online and vent about it on the site you bought it from vs if it work you forget all about the review no?
Click to expand...

All I can say is that I am on a pro-photographer type list and the guys there have had bad results with DROBO. Some of those guys are pretty sophisticated PC or Mac users.
 
spend some weeks reading smallnetbuilder reviews to see if you can glean some consensus. I agree it is difficult
 
MrGuvernment said:
newegg reviews are like amazon reviews.. most people don't have a clue!
Click to expand...

YMMV. My experience is that the average of all review on newegg is pretty good. Sure there are some clueless noobs there too, but that's everywhere. Back when Seagate was having problems with their Barracuda drives, you could have seen in coming if you read the reviews on those drives.
 
I own three Nas's, an older Netgear readynas, a Thecus and a QNap. Of the three, I would buy another QNap in a heartbeat, it's the fastest at file copying and has given me the least trouble, it is however the most expensive. I've heard good things about Synology and would consider them as well.
 
Looking at the Synology, any reason not to get the DS411J? I'm guessing it's an older model because it doesn't have as much RAM as the DS212J but would that make a huge difference? I'll primarily be using the NAS for backup storage and streaming archived HD movies from so I guess it's not a huge deal if it doesn't tear along at break-neck speeds.

My main concern with a 2-bay setup is that I'm going to hoard crap and not be able to expand. Do 2-bay NAS'es have a way to upgrade the drives without having to completely move the data off; like stepping the drives up one at a time? I'm not extremely familiar with RAID and NAS features so pardon me there.

Also, do these things typically have good power saving features?

I figure I'd throw in a couple 2TB WD Red drives to start with or is that overkill?
 
case Chenbro SR30169 - 130
whs 2011 - 50
ASUS C60M1-I AMD Fusion -80
ram 4gb ddr3 - 17
Smallish SSD for boot or 2.5" mechanical - 50
---------------------------------------------------------------
327 - a very powerful and complete nas.
bonus if you have whs license (dreamspark) , or 4gb of ram laying around, or a small laptop hdd that you aren't using.
Then you are talking a 200 dollar build.

Option: (+30-60 for psu)
Replace Case with Lian-li Q25, + power supply
Build is now 367 or so, but you now have a 5 bay hot swap nas, with option of adding a sata extender card, to have 7 hdd capacity.

option (+80)
Go intel, pick up a pentium g620, and asus z77 itx board with 6 sata ports also, it will double the price, of your cpu/motherboard, and increase the noise.. but it will be much faster.
but for a file server i'm sure the above board is more than enough.
 
Last edited:
djoye said:
Looking at the Synology, any reason not to get the DS411J? I'm guessing it's an older model because it doesn't have as much RAM as the DS212J but would that make a huge difference? I'll primarily be using the NAS for backup storage and streaming archived HD movies from so I guess it's not a huge deal if it doesn't tear along at break-neck speeds.

My main concern with a 2-bay setup is that I'm going to hoard crap and not be able to expand. Do 2-bay NAS'es have a way to upgrade the drives without having to completely move the data off; like stepping the drives up one at a time? I'm not extremely familiar with RAID and NAS features so pardon me there.

Also, do these things typically have good power saving features?

I figure I'd throw in a couple 2TB WD Red drives to start with or is that overkill?
Click to expand...
First may I say I love synology, the software was great, painless to setup, and works right out of the box.

I have a 212j and it is not upgradeable (adding and expansion unit). The 212 would be (with a 212+). Synology uses the last two numbers in the model to denote the year of the model and the first number to denote the number of bays I believe. So the 411 has 4 bays and was made in 2011.

My NAS only uses 20 or so watts when its not in its power saving mode and only 5 or so when its in sleep mode. Although the nas does have problem coming back from something called deep hibernation, regular hibernation mode works just fine though.
 
x509 said:
All I can say is that I am on a pro-photographer type list and the guys there have had bad results with DROBO. Some of those guys are pretty sophisticated PC or Mac users.
Click to expand...

referring to his reference to newegg more than anything. Not trying to be disrespectful to other reviews elsewhere ;)
 
I've setup a few synology units, and they seem pretty good to me. Software is good, they are reliable -assuming you put good drives in them. Plus you can get into them to add other apps or do things that you need since they are linux based. That's handy for me, so I can setup monitoring tools to work with nagios/cacti to report status, usage etc.
 
Qnap and Synology are going to be your best bets at that price range. Throw a external usb drive onto the NAS that it backs up to and enjoy.

Unless you want to roll your own box and run something like freenas.
 
I went ahead and threw down on a Synology DS413j and 2×WD RED 1TB drives. I might be able to throw 1TB of data on it immediately and for me another 1TB is still plenty so I think I'm all good as far as space goes and I'll leave the other two bays empty until I start hoarding more digital media.

I'll probably start cataloging albums in FLAC and find I need more space, heh.

I've keep reading about how nice the Synology is, I think my only complaint will be that it's not black.
 
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