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Network Attached Storage Roundup

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the i'll-take-7-terabytes-with-fries-and-a-coke dept.

ThinSkin writes "Not just for large corporations, NAS is creeping into the homes of normal computer users who want to share and back up their data. ExtremeTech is running a roundup of six NAS solutions and has benchmarked the performance of each to see which one is a good investment. They have also considered other factors in choosing a good NAS device, such as the amount of drives it can run, dimensions, memory, interface, supported OSes, and others."

6 comments

  1. Well.... ummm. yeah. by imboboage0 · · Score: 1

    First Post. Last Post. Only post in sight.

    I was rather hoping to read about other people's experiences with network storage, but nevermind. I can see that nobody else makes network backups here.

    --
    Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
    1. Re:Well.... ummm. yeah. by WaterBreath · · Score: 1
      Hear, hear!

      I'd really like to start storing my media (CDs and DVDs) on something like this. But there seems to be a dearth of consumer-oriented reviews of network storage devices/systems.

      If anyone takes the time to look at this roundup, I'm considering the Thecus they reviewed. But if it's as loud as they say, I'd really rather have something with similar features (particularly SATA, RAID-5 capability, lots of memory), but quieter. So if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them!

  2. And How are these connected? by theJML · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ok, I just RTFA'd and all I saw was "Ethernet". So, coming from a professional in the NAS/SAN world, Ethernet is not a standard for filesharing, or anything close to it, only for intercommunication... So do these use iSCSI? Windows File Sharing? NFS? How do the web interfaces stack up (I assume they're configured over a web interface, the pictures seemed to indicate that they were headless)? Can you run other things on the systems? Some said that they would share printers, how about USB drives? Backups? Can you attach a USB Tape drive and run periodic backups?

    Definately an interesting article, but it needs more details for accurate comparison. Also, since some are around $400-$1200 I would like a comparison between these units and say an old Pentium I have lying around that runs linux (or windows for comparison) serving files.

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    -=JML=-
    1. Re:And How are these connected? by imboboage0 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Also, since some are around $400-$1200 I would like a comparison between these units and say an old Pentium I have lying around that runs linux (or windows for comparison) serving files.

      He has a point. at a price like that, it may well be more cost-effective for many to get an upgradable network storage server. That's what I did with an old Dell Poweredge 4200 w/ dual Pentium 333s. It has 300 gigs of storage for my backups and seems to be cheaper than what they are suggesting.

      --
      Honesty may be the best policy, but by process of elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
    2. Re:And How are these connected? by stevey · · Score: 1

      Seconded.

      I was recently looking for an external hard drive system of some kind to store network backups upon, in addition to centralising my MP3/OGG collection within my home LAN.

      One thing that made choosing a device rather difficult was the lack of details on OS supported. Most drives listed 'Windows XP', and I'd assume they were just doing SMB over IP, but it was hard to tell.

      Some devices would say things like "The drive appears as a local drive letter on all machines" - at which point I'd think it was some kind of proprietry driver that I'd have little success at using with Linux.

      In the end I bought a cheap 160Gb drive which connects to a host using USB2, and now I share that amongst my LAN clients with SMB + NFS.

      Not ideal, but certainly better than risking the purchase of something that I couldn't use.

      I'll have to investigate more as I'm pretty sure I'll have this drive filled in a matter of a few months.

  3. Great to see more offerings by phorest · · Score: 3, Interesting
    When we were in the market for a reliable, functional and full-featured NAS appliance we found the offerings lacking. The only thing available besides a snap-server was a unit by Fastora. It had so much more to offer at the price than the snap-server that it was a no-brainer.

    Besides having multiple NICS (1-10/100 and 1-100 baseT) it also had 2 hot-swappable harddrives. The VIA C3 processor is pretty decent in this unit. (the file sever is now dual XEON and it is just noticeably faster *not headsnapping-fast*) it came stock with 512MB RAM.

    The user interface is very handy and seeing it is the windows storage server edition you can also use remote desktop to do everything else. We originally used it as a file server which it performed admirably, it is now used for backups only. What's great is its size which is barely bigger than a shoe-box.

    It's good to see this market developing a little bit more. I know Buffalo's terrawhatever unit looks pretty handy for $1.00 a gig, but there was no hot-swap when I originally looked them over.

    http://www.fastora.com/product_index.php?doc_name= nas-t2w

    --
    God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.