Recommend a good, cheap NAS on GBit ethernet?

[herulach]

Microserver - at least the off-the-shelf ones - will also be a LOT noiser and also larger than the equivalent 4-way NAS. Personally, I was going the microserver route then I'd sure as heck want to build it myself so I could use a high efficiency, modular PSU with a temp-sensitive FAN ... probably a Corsair or Enermax. And the size issue is a big one for me - I don't live in a mansion!

It's probably a dumb thing to say, (but wouldn't be my first or last), but the thing that put me off about FreeNAS was that the documentation and forum hardware recommendations were very much geared at a business use. So it was Xeon processor, fancy server-grade Supermicro mobo, ECC memory, multiple NIC's, etc. Costed their "recommendations" and it was the top end of £700-800! No, I was gived to wondering out loud "where's the config for a home user?".

If I could have found a case to suit then I would have been tempted by one of the low TDP Xeons - at least those can be cooled by quiet fans.

noise is a consideration, but not a huge one, and in footprint terms, they're not that big. I don't live in a mansion either, but I've room for a 1' cube.

They're not for everyone, but they are great value.

[crossy]

noise is a consideration, but not a huge one, and in footprint terms, they're not that big. I don't live in a mansion either, but I've room for a 1' cube.

They're not for everyone, but they are great value.

Actually you've got me thinking now. I knew about the HP N54L uServers - but thought that they were a bit limited, but then I saw this.

Picture came from here. Looks like a pretty neat piece of kit - available with 17W Xeon or 35W Pentium/Celeron; 4 disk bays; internal USB slot and uSD (FreeNAS boot drive?); plenty of USB ports and NIC's; RAID controller and even Integrated Lights Out (ILO) support for remote install/admin. Oh, and you can change the bezel too - red, blue, silver and black.

Best of all, it's not that big (judge by the laptop optical drive used in the picture!), doesn't draw much power and has a quoted noise level of 18dB(A). Pricing seems to be okay - at £352 (Ebuyer) for a 2.3GHz Celeronit's only £100 more than the AMD-Turion based N54L (also eBuyer). Although the N54L also seems to have an HP cashback offer running this month (nice of them to tell me!) making that N54L £149 all in - which is a steal in my book.

So tempted...

Did a bit more research over the weekend and there's seems to be quite a few folks saying that the "recommendations" from FreeNAS aren't suitable for home use (no kidding) and that the software will work quite happily - in a domestic setting - with a lot lower (and therefore cheaper) hardware load-out. And (coincidentally) there were one or two folks using FreeNAS on an HP Microserver.

[jim]

The N54L could be had for under £100 a couple of weeks ago IIRC.

[Wa1lock]

In my experience when it comes to NAS you should definitely spend more than 200 bucks. All of the cheaper NAS are performing really bad and get about the speed of a USB 2.0 drive. I just had a Western Digital My Cloud EX4 with four WD RED HDDs for a review and it got only about 60 megabyte/s read and write speeds. This one costs about 650€ here in Germany. So to get the real performance of GBit Ethernet you have to spend at least 800€. At this point it would make more sense to build your own homeserver. A very cheap alternative is to use something like the Raspberry Pi with an external HDD.

Hope I could help!

[crossy]

The N54L could be had for under £100 a couple of weeks ago IIRC.

Grr. Best price I could find - courtesy of HUKD - was £116 ex delivery at Servers Plus.
which is still less than the £130+ that I'd need for either a single 4TB WD Red or 16GB of memory.

And HP company shop doesn't "do" any of the Microservers. (although I guess there's nothing stopping me getting the support pack from there and then doing a cashback from HP same as for the Microserver itself.)

Actually it gets more interesting. I came across this posting on the Plex site about using something called XPenology on the N54L:

The servers are currently on offer in the UK with £100 cash back (the deals seem to run all the time though) - I got mine for under £77 which is ridiculous IMO. The hard drives are about £100 each for the Reds. The USB was free for me but an extra tenner if I needed to buy one. Total cost about £287 -> 2.2GHz dual core, 2GB RAM and 6.25TB worth of storage. (2x3TB WD Red's)

An empty 4 bay Synology DS414 is about £350 - with a slower processor, less RAM, less customisability and no hard drives. What you do get for your money is extreme ease of use and Synology support.

XPenology seems to be to Synology's DSM what AOSP is to Android. So you could, as the quote says above, get the cheap N54L, add XPenology and get something functionally equivalent to the Synology DSM's. Install process, example given here, doesn't look too onerous either.

[meggiedude]

Personally I love my Zyxel NSA325.
Fan was a tad noisy - so I swapped mine out for a few quid.

Great bit of kit and with 2x2TB on Raid - ultra reliable, and cheap as chips (relatively)

[meggiedude]

@fuddam

Did you actually get anywhere with this dude?

Lots of the posts above are looking at solutions that don't fit into your price bracket.

Have a look at something like the the diskless twin bay Zyxel NSA-320 (almost identical to the NSA-325 but with slightly slower processor). Its a quality bit of kit with gigabit LAN (as you specify) and at a low, low price and can be had from places like ebuyer for under 60quid, and you can then populate with a couple of whatever spec of disk you like.
Adding the disks and setting up RAID 1/mirrored or Raid 0/performance is a breeze. Its going to be a lot better solution than a cheap single disk NAS.

[fma965]

Install process, example given "URL REMOVED DUE TO 5 POST REQUIREMENT EVEN THOUGH IM QUOTING IT :/", doesn't look too onerous either.

Hey i originally came on here to reply to you quoting my tutorial but i then realised there was also discussion of a nsa320/325, i would like to mention i did have a ZyXEL NSA320 but recently sold it to buy a HP N54L and i don't regret it, at £100 (once i get cashback) it was a absolute steal, sickbeard, couchpotato etc all work great running on XPEnology.

THE NSA320 MAXED out at ~60MB/s where as the HP N54L goes to around 115MB/s via samba, and sickbeard and couchpotato used to be really slow at loading on the nsa320 whereas the hp n54l has no issues.