NAS
Over the last few years, the developments in the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) network-attached storage (NAS) market have mostly been on the software front - bringing in more business-oriented value additions and better support for containers and virtual machines. We have had hardware updates in terms of processor choices and inclusion of M.2 SSD slots (primarily for SSD caching), but they have not been revolutionary changes. At CES 2023, QNAP revealed plans for two different NAS units - the all-flash TBS-574X (based on the Intel Alder Lake-P platform), and the ML-focused TS-AI642 (based on the Rockchip RK3588 app processor). While QNAP only provided a teaser of the capabilities, there are a couple of points worth talking about to get an idea of where the COTS NAS...
Asustor's 5 Series Packs Intel Bay Trail Celerons
Since last CES, a couple of Asustor offerings have been put under our review scanner, and we were naturally excited to meet up with them at CES 2015. Towards...
3 by Ganesh T S on 1/12/2015AMD Enters NAS Market with QNAP's 10G-Ready TVS-x63
QNAP's CES suite was quite busy when we visited them last week. Considering the number of product and feature announcements that were made, it wasn't a surprise at all...
21 by Ganesh T S on 1/11/2015Synology's BeyondCloud Series - NAS Units made User-Friendly
Synology has put out some interesting updates (both expected as well as unexpected) in the lead up to the new year. At CES 2015, the focus is on a...
12 by Ganesh T S on 1/6/2015QNAP TS-853 Pro 8-bay Intel Bay Trail SMB NAS Review
QNAP has focused on Intel's Bay Trail platform for this generation of NAS units (compared to Synology's efforts with Intel Rangeley). While the choice made sense for the prosumer-targeted...
58 by Ganesh T S on 12/29/2014HGST Deskstar NAS 6 TB Review
The increasing affordability of SSDs has put a strain on the traditional market for hard drive vendors. However, hard drives continue to remain the storage medium of choice for...
36 by Ganesh T S on 12/23/2014Holiday Guides 2014: COTS NAS Units
We have already published holiday guides for mobile devices, motherboards, GPUs and SSDs. Today, we will take a look at the various options available in the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS...
26 by Ganesh T S on 12/17/2014Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD 6 TB Review
Hard drives continue to remain the storage medium of choice for applications where capacity and cost factors outweigh performance requirements. Vendors have also realized that enterprise hard drives are...
52 by Ganesh T S on 12/10/2014Synology's DS2015xs brings ARM to High-Performance NAS Units
In the current NAS market, it is downright impossible to talk of ARM and high performance together. The most powerful ARM-based NAS units have been based on Marvell's ARMADA...
27 by Ganesh T S on 12/9/2014Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD: WD Red Pro Gets a Competitor
We have seen this story play out before. Western Digital delineates the hard drive market with a product aimed at a particular niche and Seagate comes in a few...
22 by Ganesh T S on 12/2/2014Asustor AS7008T 8-bay Intel Haswell SMB NAS Review
Asustor is one of the recent entrants in the NAS market. Over the last couple of years, they have tried to play in the same space as QNAP and...
29 by Ganesh T S on 11/30/2014HGST Deskstar NAS 4 TB Review
The increasing affordability of SSDs has put a strain on the traditional market for hard drive vendors. However, new opportunities have opened up, thanks to the rapid growth in...
40 by Ganesh T S on 11/22/2014Synology DS1815+ 8-bay Intel Rangeley SMB NAS Review
Synology started the roll-out of their SMB-targeted NAS units based on Intel's latest Atom platform (Rangeley) in September 2014. We have already looked at the 4-bay DS415+ in detail...
65 by Ganesh T S on 11/18/2014Synology Launches 8-bay Rangeley-based DS1815+
In the last week of September, Synology launched their Intel Rangeley-based DS415+. In our review, we found it resolved most of the issues encountered in the previous Atom-based SMB...
11 by Ganesh T S on 11/4/2014Synology DS415+ Review: DSM on Intel Rangeley
Synology recently launched the DS415+, their first Intel Rangeley-based NAS. This 4-bay NAS, targeted towards SMBs and SOHOs, finally brings about hardware accelerated encryption capabilities to DSM in the...
42 by Ganesh T S on 10/30/2014Synology Launches Rangeley-based DS415+, DSM 5.1 Beta Goes Live
Synology has been relatively quiet over the last couple of months (barring the responses to various security issues), but, today, they are coming out with a couple of expected...
15 by Ganesh T S on 9/23/2014PROMISE FileCruiser: A Private Dropbox-like Solution for SMBs and SMEs
PROMISE Technology launched a private Dropbox-like cloud storage solution for enterprise file synchronization and sharing last week. Dubbed 'FileCruiser', this is a comprehensive solution targeting SMBs and SMEs (particularly...
8 by Ganesh T S on 8/28/2014Seagate's Intel Rangeley NAS Pro 4-bay Review
Seagate recently rebooted their NAS offerings, completely revamping their 2013 Business Storage lineup and dropping that software platform altogether. In its place, they adopted a Debian-based offering, NAS OS...
14 by Ganesh T S on 8/27/2014Recovering Data from a Failed Synology NAS
It was bound to happen. After 4+ years of running multiple NAS units 24x7, I finally ended up with a bricked NAS. Did I lose data? Were my recovery...
55 by Ganesh T S on 8/22/2014NAS Units as VM Hosts: QNAP's Virtualization Station Explored
Virtualization has been around since the 1960s, but it has emerged as a hot topic over the last decade or so. Despite the rising popularity, its applications have been...
40 by Ganesh T S on 8/18/2014ioSafe 1513+ Review: A Disaster-Resistant Synology DS1513+
The 3-2-1 data backup strategy involves keeping three copies of all essential data, spread over at least two different devices with at least one of them being off-site or...
43 by Ganesh T S on 8/13/2014