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SOHO 2-bay NAS

U

unclben

Junior Member
I'm getting old and short on time and I'm ready to move from a homegrown NAS to a prebuilt machine. I'm looking for advice from folks who have "been there done that" or who know of good reviews to point me in the right direction.

My environment is not high I/O, so my hardware requirements are pretty modest. I'm looking for a diskless, 2-bay enclosure. A high-end Marvell/ARM CPU will be sufficiently powerful, but I could be convinced to upgrade if it will significantly benefit encrypted read/write speeds. I want at least 512 MiB of memory. I only need one GbE port.

My household has a mix of Linux and OS X machines so rock-solid & fast AFP / NFS / Linux CIFS capabilities are strongly preferred. Strong encryption for internal drives is required. Strong encryption for external (USB/eSATA) drives is preferred. Full-disk encryption is preferred over file/folder/share-level encryption. The quieter the better, but absolute silence is not a requirement. I'm a normal person, not an SPCR enthusiast.

I don't need Fortune 500 kit (obviously, since I'm only looking for a 2-bay NAS) but I also don't want el-cheapo Walmart crap. The Synology DS213/213+ and QNAP TS-219PII / TS-269L are at the top of my list right now, but I'm open to anything with suitable quality & features.

Anybody have any compelling reasons to choose one over the rest? I'm paralyzed by indecision! Thanks in advance.
 
I know a friend who has the QNAP TS, the one you stated and I ask, He goes its up and running 24/7 no problems.
 
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I've been running a Synology DS212j for over year now and love it. It runs everything I through at it.
 
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Don't get a Seagate GoFlex Home, whatever you do. There were some bad reviews, then something about a firmware upgrade, then some reviews that said it was fine.

I don't know about that. I got one a few months back, and it was running OK, although sometimes there was a pause accessing it intially. But I just recently had a file corrupted on it, which really bothers me.

I had something similar happen to another NAS of mine, a generic "Gigabit NAS" (also called an NS-349), with an IDE drive. Some of my pictures were showing up corrupted, randomly. I determined that the RAM in the NAS had gone bad, so I junked it.

Now, I'm pretty-much determined to "roll my own", and am looking at something that can run ZFS, with ECC RAM.
 
212j has been doing fine for me as well.

I don't do full disk encryption, but I've heard that you'll take a bit of a performance hit if you enable it. The CPU in that thing isn't particularly powerful. Ultimately, you'll get what you pay for. Might be worth while to spend the extra money on the 213+.
 
I have the Synology DS211j. It's fine but I'd recommend the DS213+ if you can afford it. I have the DS413 which has the same CPU. It also has both USB 3 and eSATA, which is very helpful for local backups.

The DS413/DS213+ also has OK encrypted speed, since the PowerPC CPU has integrated encryption support.
 
Zxian said:
212j has been doing fine for me as well.

I don't do full disk encryption, but I've heard that you'll take a bit of a performance hit if you enable it. The CPU in that thing isn't particularly powerful. Ultimately, you'll get what you pay for. Might be worth while to spend the extra money on the 213+.
Click to expand...
I've gone over Synology's website a couple times and I can't find any mention of full-disk encryption on the 213j, 213, 213+, or even the 412+ (which has an Atom CPU). I can't believe that a NAS targeted at the SMB market wouldn't offer encrypted disks, but I sure can't see any mention of it from Synology.
 
AFAIK, all do encryption, but most are slow. The DS213+ is moderate speed though since the PowerPC CPU in it supports it natively.

perf_chart_2_encrypted.jpg
 
VirtualLarry said:
Don't get a Seagate GoFlex Home, whatever you do. There were some bad reviews, then something about a firmware upgrade, then some reviews that said it was fine.

I don't know about that. I got one a few months back, and it was running OK, although sometimes there was a pause accessing it intially. But I just recently had a file corrupted on it, which really bothers me.

I had something similar happen to another NAS of mine, a generic "Gigabit NAS" (also called an NS-349), with an IDE drive. Some of my pictures were showing up corrupted, randomly. I determined that the RAM in the NAS had gone bad, so I junked it.

Now, I'm pretty-much determined to "roll my own", and am looking at something that can run ZFS, with ECC RAM.
Click to expand...


I built a Nexentastor NAS albeit without ECC. It's works well and transfers pretty fast.

If I had to do it again I'd probably just get one of the new Drobos. Something that uses less power and takes less space. I realize that ZFS offers some advantages but none of my data is seriously critical. Media can withstand a bit flip and error correct itself fine. Any actually critical data should be backed up another way which for me fits in a few emails as attachments. Network performance is pretty much equal.
 
Eug said:
AFAIK, all do encryption, but most are slow. The DS213+ is moderate speed though since the PowerPC CPU in it supports it natively.

perf_chart_2_encrypted.jpg
Click to expand...
Eug, I actually found that exact graph yesterday. Between that performance comparison and the great price Amazon currently has, I pulled the trigger on a DS213+ last night. I guess I will learn to live with a lack of volume encryption.

Thanks everybody for your input and guidance.
 
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