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  • debdrup - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    Would have loved to see EonNAS reviewed along-side these excellent appliance-NAS solutions.
    EonNAS is a Synology-like device, except it runs zfs. If anyone's interested, or if Anand wants to add the review, it's available here: http://www.infortrend.com/global/products/families...
  • Murloc - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    Anand retired from this website.
  • otherwise - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    Do any of these units do read patrolling? The fact that ZFS based DIY NAS units do and I can't find any information about COTS units have kept me away.
  • ganeshts - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    Synology has the ability to manually do data scrubbing (read patrolling has the same end effect).

    Synology DSM – > Storage Manager -> Disk Group -> Manage -> Start data scrubbing

    You can trigger it manually via SSH for the QNAP units:

    http://www.vestergaard.it/cms/index.php/technicaln...
  • otherwise - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    Can you put it on a schedule? This is literally the only feature that's kept me away from COTS units.
  • ganeshts - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    It is trivial to schedule cron jobs in both Synology and QNAP NAS units. You have full SSH access. If you are tech-savvy enough to go the DIY route / familiar with Linux scripting, I can guarantee that these two COTS NAS vendors are open enough to let you do what you want (with respect to scripting)
  • Maltz - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    You don't even have to use SSH on Synology anymore. With DSM 5.x, you can schedule shell scripts to run via the GUI. I have a couple of tasks set up that do data scrubbing and custom offsite backups using rsync.
  • Nenad - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    If Netgear ReadyNAS is using btrfs, that would give you same effect and even more.
  • otherwise - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    This seems like a terrible idea for a NAS, Raid5/6 are not considered stable yet on btrfs.
  • chizow - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    Solid guide, I have personal experience with the Lenovo/Iomega and WD MyCloud NAS units and they are cheap, solid units that work well for a home environment with limited concurrent connections and lower end demands (network streaming, non-speed intensive transfers etc).

    I would love the performance of some of these Synology/Qnap boxes that use Intel's Atom platform, but they are too pricey for me to justify them for home use.

    One other brand that I have read favorable reviews on that slots in between the Iomega and Qnap/Synology's of the world is Buffalo, good performance at a price point that is on the lower end of the spectrum.

    I personally use a WD MyCloud EX4 right now, although its not the fastest NAS unit out there, it has great Cloud storage integration and multi-app support.
  • romrunning - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    What we need here is a chart with all of the shared and exclusive features listed. That would make this a really helpful guide when you're looking for specific features.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    How do the vendors stack up on post sale OS support? eg Will I be able to get fixes for software/kernel bugs 4 or 5 years down the line.
  • ObstinateMuon - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    I've been eyeing the FreeNAS mini from ixsystems.com

    Any thoughts on it?
  • johkeeng - Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - link

    Do any of these unit support ECC memory ?
  • mbaroud - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    I am looking for a 4 drive one.
    That can handle the media and be able to backup sync the smartphones and the laptops
    From what i was reading it looks like the DS415+ is a better option on this than the TS-451. Any input? (PS this will be my first NAS)
  • ganeshts - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    For home multimedia use - the TS-451 with hardware-accelerated transcoding is better than the 415+ ; Backup / sync capabilities are available for both QNAP and Synology - which one is better is a matter of personal preference - they both achieve the intended purpose.

    The DS415+ is targeted more towards business users - slightly better performance for simultaneous multi-client accesses / hardware-accelerated encryption etc.
  • sovking - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    What about an ZFS based NAS server like the ones proposed by ixsystems.com: FreeNAS mini, FreeNAS, TrueNAS etc ??
  • Lezmaka - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    What do you mean by "single point of contact for both the NAS and the hard drives" and how is it different from the options above?
  • ganeshts - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    If you buy a diskless unit and one of the disks starts acting up - there is a slight probability that the disk might pass S.M.A.R.T or PC-based tests - the drive vendor refuses to accept RMA, and the NAS refuses to accept the hard drive (I have personally had this happen, actually). One might just repurpose the 'acting up' disk - but there are many who don't have that option.

    In such a case, for example, with the EX4, say - all the 'blame' would like squarely on Western Digital - they have to resolve the issue for the customer. That is what I meant by 'single point of contact'.
  • McDude - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    Why no mention of Drobo? I would think it certainly competes with the rest of this group, and it's popular enough not to overlook.
  • sandwich_hlp - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    I was wondering the exact same thing.
  • ganeshts - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    Two links to peruse:

    http://www.restoringdata.ca/drobo-recovery-service...

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/8399/recovering-data...

    In addition, we can only recommend units that we have had personal experience with. We tried contacting Drobo for a review unit many years ago, but they have never responded.
  • praeses - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link

    Would Lime Technology's (UnRAID) AVS-10/4 classify as COTS or would that be more whitebox/OEM (or fall into the DIY stuff as mentionned at the end)?
  • Gigaplex - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link

    The RN716X is a 6-bay device running btrfs? Uh... btrfs is still experimental/unfinished with regards to RAID5/6. Are they nuts?
  • ganeshts - Friday, December 19, 2014 - link

    It is an interesting situation - Since they are COTS, they don't need to offer ALL advantages of btrfs to the end-user - just what they claim in their marketing collateral / consumer pitch.. So, the way Netgear is able to offer it to the consumer base traditionally used to RAIDx w/ ext3/4 is by making the BTRFS volumes sit on top of a traditional md file system to support RAID5/6. This balances the familiarity of mdadm-based RAID with some essential features of btrfs (not all advantages of btrfs are available in the current implementation).
  • mpbrede - Monday, December 29, 2014 - link

    I must be slowly going insane. I could swear that when I read this article after it was originally posted there was reference to a forthcoming (next week) review of DIY NAS setups. I remember thinking that would be great to make a decision before I pull the trigger on a replacement system for my home NAS.

    Then the next week, I looked for the article, it wasn't there, the same promise was still in the opening paragraphs for this article and I thought "well, it's Christmas, it'll probably be out the week after."

    Now it's the week after, and there is no mention of a DIY NAS review or article anymore.

    Are those the men in white coats I see...?

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