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Which NAS device should I get?

P

PUN

Golden Member
This is going to be for home use. Printer sharing, Streaming movies, pictures, documents and backup solution in RAID-1, while maintaining low power usage.

Synology DS211J
Qnap TS219+

are the ones i've looked at so far. The price difference is quite significant (Qnap is $349 vs $210)

Most PCs will be on wifi (300Mbs) so the transfer rate is probably not going to be that important (since it would be bottlenecked by the wifi, as my 2 PCs at 300Mbs N yields 10-11MBs on WRT610N) Even if I upgrade my router to Netgear 3700, transfer would still be limited to 15MBs.

TIA
 
It depends what you want to be doing with it.

Streaming movies, can be a minimal load, or it can be very demanding:
Streaming high-bit rate material (e.g. blu-ray data rate material) to a low-end media player (e.g. a WDTV live) is extremely demanding, and requires very fast response times (even an out-of-the box linux server installation on a C2Q won't achieve fast enough performance!! The system will need to be tweaked for low latency). As it is I have a QNAP (a 410 model - so significantly slower than the 219p+), and was able to tune it so that 40 Mbps material could be streamed reliably to a WDTV live, even with multiple simultaneous PC users.
Streaming 720p or SD material is much less stressful. However, a wireless link is barely adequate for 720p, and unsuitable for 1080p.

Printer sharing on these linux type NAS boxes is a bit flaky. Yes, it works. But you don't get the ink-status reports, etc. on the PCs. You also need to make sure that your printer is on the compatability list. Good luck if you printer isn't there (believe me, you'll need it).

Backup works fine, just be aware that if you have a lot of data you want to back up (several TB) it can take days to transfer.

The QNAP has the advantage that it is a substantially more powerful machine. It uses a significantly faster processor (1.6 GHz, compared to a 1.2 GHz) and has considerably more RAM (512 MB, compared to 128 MB in the synology). The QNAP has a number of supported add-on applications, including download tools (e.g. if you want to download large files, the qnap can do it autonomously, instead of leaving your PC on overnight). While synology do offer such a package, 128 MB RAM is too little to be useful, and such software runs like ass, and cripples the whole box.

You may find the extra speed (due to better CPU and more RAM for caching) useful if you are handling lots of smaller files (e.g. word documents, etc.). Managing directories with hundreds of files in is likely to be intolerable with the DS211.

The QNAP also provides a linux console - so you can configure/customize it as you wish (assuming you know how to use the linux command line).

Is the QNAP worth the higher price? I can't tell you - it all depends on how you will be using it.
 
i have the intel qnap and i would ditch all the apps they don't belong on such a weak box. the system would crash when using usb or ntfs since it stressed the poor atom dual core to the limit
 
Emulex said:
i have the intel qnap and i would ditch all the apps they don't belong on such a weak box. the system would crash when using usb or ntfs since it stressed the poor atom dual core to the limit
Click to expand...

I must confess, I've had reasonable success with a number of apps on my 800 Mhz ARM Qnap. Obviously, performance isn't great - but good enough to share the device between 3 people, and download simultaneously.

Some things were problematic:
The integrated 'itunes server' one of the built-in (non-optional) apps (actually the open source program 'firefly' also called 'mtdappd'), is a resource hog, buggy as hell and non-longer in development. If I switched it on, the NAS would crash - hard. Totally unresponsive, needing a hard reboot. It's disapointing that QNAP even bundle this one, given it's unusable (and worse, it can crash the NAS), and is no longer supported by the developers.
The iSCSI functionality is provided by the open source 'LIO' program. The version provided by QNAP isn't stable and, as it's a kernel module, can destabilize the kernel and other apps. I get frequent iSCSI disconnections, all sorts of weird problems with the other server apps (which then start misbehaving). Kernel logs reveal dozens of weird kernel errors and backtraces. My NAS was horribly unstable until I killed the iSCSI target. Since then it's been a whole new machine.

However, once I turned these functions off - the system has been remarkably well behaved. I've even used the add-on package SABnzbd to retrieve NZB binaries (which works really nicely), with minimal trouble.
 
dunno my ole inspiron 530 with 4 drives seems 100% uptime doing many things at once - transcoding 10 security cam's, transcoding video 2 iphone, utorrent, serving up files, etc. cost like $500 with 4 1tb - the slic licensing was a big bonus 😉
 
Thanks for all your help guys.
I thought about building a server, but it consumes too much power (possibly louder), bigger and less simplified.

I think I'll go with DS211J since it would serve me well as a glorified USB HD on my router.
I won't access much document files since it would just be an emergency backup...mostly media files.

Can I access DS211 remotely using the web interface?
 
Mark R said:
It depends what you want to be doing with it.

Streaming movies, can be a minimal load, or it can be very demanding:
Streaming high-bit rate material (e.g. blu-ray data rate material) to a low-end media player (e.g. a WDTV live) is extremely demanding, and requires very fast response times (even an out-of-the box linux server installation on a C2Q won't achieve fast enough performance!! The system will need to be tweaked for low latency). As it is I have a QNAP (a 410 model - so significantly slower than the 219p+), and was able to tune it so that 40 Mbps material could be streamed reliably to a WDTV live, even with multiple simultaneous PC users.
Streaming 720p or SD material is much less stressful. However, a wireless link is barely adequate for 720p, and unsuitable for 1080p.

Printer sharing on these linux type NAS boxes is a bit flaky. Yes, it works. But you don't get the ink-status reports, etc. on the PCs. You also need to make sure that your printer is on the compatability list. Good luck if you printer isn't there (believe me, you'll need it).

Backup works fine, just be aware that if you have a lot of data you want to back up (several TB) it can take days to transfer.

The QNAP has the advantage that it is a substantially more powerful machine. It uses a significantly faster processor (1.6 GHz, compared to a 1.2 GHz) and has considerably more RAM (512 MB, compared to 128 MB in the synology). The QNAP has a number of supported add-on applications, including download tools (e.g. if you want to download large files, the qnap can do it autonomously, instead of leaving your PC on overnight). While synology do offer such a package, 128 MB RAM is too little to be useful, and such software runs like ass, and cripples the whole box.

You may find the extra speed (due to better CPU and more RAM for caching) useful if you are handling lots of smaller files (e.g. word documents, etc.). Managing directories with hundreds of files in is likely to be intolerable with the DS211.

The QNAP also provides a linux console - so you can configure/customize it as you wish (assuming you know how to use the linux command line).

Is the QNAP worth the higher price? I can't tell you - it all depends on how you will be using it.
Click to expand...

have you upgraded the memory on the qnap? also how does the WOL work. there's a wattage quote for operational use, then one quote for hiberation i think the HDs go to spindown, then a 1watt quote for the whole device ready to recv a WOL. the WOL has to be sent from a PC... is it a command line thing?
 
abc said:
have you upgraded the memory on the qnap? also how does the WOL work. there's a wattage quote for operational use, then one quote for hiberation i think the HDs go to spindown, then a 1watt quote for the whole device ready to recv a WOL. the WOL has to be sent from a PC... is it a command line thing?
Click to expand...

My QNAP doesn't have upgradeable memory (it's soldered in). Nor does it had WOL hardware. So I can't answer your questions.

The memory on the Atom versions (x59 and x59+) is upgradeable up to 2 GB (but this configuration is not supported).
 
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