…but only space-wise. I actually have been pretty busy the last weeks as you might have noticed seeing the low posting rate, but I am back and with some new gear in the lab as well. So I thought it a good idea to first get this off the list, as I had promised gear-buying help here as well:
But first a warning – I am a computer engineer, so you might find some of the info below to be actually more confusing than helpful. Don’t blame me 
As told in Move To Texas? I had been running out of photo disk space quickly, and had also my shared music library on the same backup drive taking away my much needed backup space. So I went the full length and bought me a little home NAS – a network attached storage which effectively is a little (tiny) file server housing one or more disk drives, and having an Ethernet connection to allow for multiple computers in the home network to access it’s data.
So, let’s look at how I arrived at the buying decision: I wanted the NAS to
- Provide sufficient network disk space for my lab computer as well as my wife’s much loved Apple MacBook.
- Have enough disk space to store all my data on it for the foreseeable future, and also hold backup images of the desktop computer.
- House the music library of MP3 files as well, in order to provide some streaming client (at that time to still to be chosen) access to the music without the desktop computer being powered up.
- Host the private photo albums easily accessible from the Web or the Home, ideally with a simple photo hosting application that can serve full HD images to my plasma TV via the MacBook.
I was aware that the NAS would not
- Be a backup storage itself – data needs to be stored at two places at all times!
- Provide fast enough storage space to allow for fast browsing or even direct storage of RAW files and working files – these would need to stay on the desktop’s drive, and only a shadow copy as a backup would be stored on the NAS.
So I came up with a list of technical requirements for the NAS:
- Be a model with BYOD (bring your own disks), as I wanted to choose the disk drives myself (and thought it would be actually cheaper to get them by myself)
- Allow for at least one Terabyte of disk space, better two.
- Allow for mirroring drives with RAID 1 – this requires the device to have at least two disk bays, and all single drive units were out of the game.
- Allow for RAID 0 (striping) as well instead, as I can see myself running out of the space on the mirrored drives eventually…
- Have some sort of media server for the music to be bought music streaming client.
- A plus would be an external SATA port, because you need to backup the NAS as well and in that case you can attach a fast external hard drive, and not just a normal slower USB drive for this.
Additional non-functional requirements:
- Be rather quiet and power saving…
- Be FAST! A Gigabit Ethernet port was non problem, as all units seemed to have it, but reading the benchmarks at benchmarkreviews.com and smallnetbuilder.com made it quickly clear that there are very large speed differences. And you have to pay for performance, every additional 100€ increases the performance level substantially.
- Be no more expensive than 400€ including 2 TB disk space!
So let’s have a look at the candidates!
QNAP Turbostation TS-209Pro II
The Qnap TS-209 Pro was a bit over budget at about 460€ including two 1 TB drives, but looked actually very promising. It does have the required two drive bays, does offer media streaming via UPNP and DLNA, and got great 5 star reviews at Amazon. Complaints seem to be mostly about the device being “not silent”. It does not sport an external SATA connection, though, so additional backup drives would need to be connected to it using the slower USB ports.
Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo
The Buffalo LinkStation Pro in it’s two drive variant is one of the cheaper devices, being at about 235€ with two 500 GByte drives. It does offer RAID 0, but is criticized as being outright loud, and its write performance is not really gold standard with less than 10 MByte/s according to the data at smallnetbuilder.com. As I did not find a version for BYOD, I did not consider the Buffalo device further despite it’s interesting price, and the slow speed also made me look for other alternatives.
Thecus N3200 Pro
The Thecus system is the only system I looked at that supports even 3 drives instead of only two, and with that also allows for RAID 5 striping accross all three drives. As the performance seems to be bad with RAID 5 due to the high CPU power required, I didn’t see this as a real advantage, though. And it certainly failed my budget check at 555€ including the two 1 TB drives. So I continued my search…
D-Link DNS-323
Even cheaper than the Buffalo at only 310€ including two 1 TB drives, the DNS 323 seems to be reasonably fast, but just has a more basic feature set. The reviews at Amazon were very mixed, however, indicating also a lot of little software issues and quirks that I really don’t want to live through at home – I expect a special purpose computer to just work. They do run on Linux, after all!
Netgear ReadyNAS RND2000
The Netgear convinced me with a very thorough looking hardware, and got great reviews throughout with very substantial performance numbers. At a price of about 430€ including the two 1 TB drives it also seemed slightly cheaper than the QNAP system, and supports media streaming as well as many other applications. The drives are formated using Netgears proprietary X-RAID, which makes me nervous given that I’d like to keep control of my data and would prefer a standard format of the drives like e.g. Linux EXT3 filesystem in case the device breaks down with no replacement in sight. But that might be a minor nit, I am sure the system delivers well. Why didn’t I get a ReadyNAS then? Well, because then I found the Synology!
Synology Disk Station DS207+
Ok, at the time of writing the successors of this model have already been announced being faster but also more expensive, but the Synology DiskStation DS207+ convinced me: At 430€ including two 1 TB drives, it is at the same price level as the Netgear and the QNAP, but offers in addition to the QNAP the eSata port I was looking for.
But what really quickly made the decision for me was the highly praised web frontend to mange the system – the Synology does provide a modern and easy to use Web-frontend, which makes working with the device and administering it actually fun!
Having the Synology on duty for about 4 weeks now, I must add that also their support and the surprisingly large community is absolutely outstanding! The Synology forums are a great resource for all questions about the functionality, and the dedicated Synology Wiki even contains information about “modding” the little server and installing additional software. Like the other devices in this category you can even get a Linux command prompt via SSH, which is not for the faint of heart, but for a seasoned Unix veteran a nice trait.
Meanwhile I added an installation of the Squeezecenter media server, and bought a Squeezebox Classic streaming client for my living room. I just love it!
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