Decided on a NAS: Zyxel, Infrant or Qnap
Published March 30th, 2008 in NAS, Qnap, Time machine, ZyxelI needed a NAS urgently. There were several NAS in the game, the Zyxel 220 for the price, the Qnap 209 for the email notifications, the Infrant ReadyNAS because someone told me it was excellent and the Qnap 409, another 4-drive NAS. After some considerations, I chose the Qnap 409.
Why not the 209 or the Zyxel? As 2-drive NAS systems they both had no path for online migration to higher capacity drives. Also adding capacity is much easier for a 4-drive NAS than for a 2-drive NAS. Having two 750gb drives in the NAS and adding a third one will double the capacity from 750gb to 1.5tb. Whereas with a 2-drive NAS you have to replace the drives completely. The Infrant had some discussions on their forums with failed drives which stopped me from buying the ReadyNAS (Also they have been bought by Netgear). So the Qnap 409 is on it’s way with two WD 750 GP drives for an initial RAID-1 setup.
Hope they work with time machine, or I have to buy an additional time capsule ;-)
Update: Time machine works.
I am looking to upgrade my NSLU2 - it’s got a 500 mb external usb2 drive now but i’m tempted by media streaming to my xbox/setting up bittorrents without running a computer.
Which did you choose?
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/ this site has some pretty useful reviews, the xfer speed kinda flipped me out but I still am interested in the Zyxel. Never heard of the Infrant one b4 this blog posting.
Yes I’ve been reading all the small net builder reviews. When choosing a 2-drive NAS, I would have gone with the Zyxel, just because it’s much cheaper than the Qnap 209 and in the end I can do without the email notification for failed drives which the Qnap 209 has.
When you have the spare money, I’d go with the Qnap 409. That’s the one I’ve ordered, because in the long run it will be cheaper to upgrade with 2 additional 750gb drives for 2.25tb of storage. All migrations without loss of data. But its 3x the price of the Zyxel here in Germany.
Whoa, yeah that looks nice. But then with the Infrant being on your list of options this one follows … you must have serious media storage needs.
http://www.foursky.com/?p=8 I like their comparison…if I get one this big I know I’ll have to decorate it, with a sticker making it look like a toaster.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2275005,00.asp I must have blinked because I’m surprised to see Terabyte drives have arrived. ~$300 ea. (That’s like 0.20 EUR right? sigh)
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Yes, the foursky review was one of my decision points in favor of the 409. I wanted it as I said because of the online migration feature.
We’re shooting raw with two DSLRs which do produce lots of megabytes.
0.20 EUR, not yet … But 2009 when the $ will crash seriously because of the Fed printing money like crazy and everyone trying to dept themselves out of recession … well then it might be 0.20 EUR ;-) Terabytes have arrived but are quite expensive, a 750gb drive is much cheaper per MB.
The online migration feature is very very neat.
For my media-consumption and home-server usage and other needs the Synology $320 DS-207 is the right one for me - they have a bigger one coming out soon called DS-508 if I need 5 drives. Shooting RAW, that would be a big need.
I found some 750gb drives for $140 which is much cheaper than the Terabyte drives.
Me, I’m collecting energy-drinks under my mattress in preparation for the food shortages due to the upcoming American chaos as more people drop below the poverty line. Seriously I just hope the next prez can be a leader to more than 40% of our population, and make us proud again of what we have and are. Sigh.
Please let us know how loud it really is—can you have it in your living room?
@Dirk: After some days of operation:
Installation was easy.
Time machine was tricky but does work now.
It feels very solid. Good quality for the money.
The GP drives are tolerable. The fan is quite loud, at least mine is. Too loud for the living room, I have it in a closet near the wlan/dsl router so I do not care.
Otherwise works great and - for now - without any problems. I’m very satisfied should it stay this way.
FYI Papst makes really quiet fans, normal prices too, < $20. May have to do soldering in some NAS’ though.
Yes, I had Papst fans in my old computers when I still bought PCs.
The loud thing is the fan of the power supply unit, so I’ll need to change the whole unit. Might be more expensive than $20. But as the NAS is currently in a closet, the noise is no big deal.
@stephan, nick, thanks. I remember the Pabst fans :-)
I’m still undecided. If I have to hide it in a closet, I might still be better of using one of my old servers and doing a soft raid using Linux.
What happens if your NAS server hardware (not the drives) dies and you can’t get a replacement? Do you think you can still read the drives? Or do you have a separate backup plan?
@Dirk: My backup plan: For some important documents I use Mozy.
The Qnap is a Linux server which you can ssh into. The drives are mirrored and use ext3. So I can plug them into a Linux box. The Qnap can also do auto backups, not sure if I use that to backup the Qnap to my external Linux server. The Qnap also uses fairly common hardware. Replacements should be possible. If it breaks down and the company still sells boxes, the easiest way is to buy a new one and plug the drives in.
The Infrant box is hardware RAID, where as the QNAP box is software.