NAS Solution

[Professor Frink]

I'm thinking of getting a 2 bay NAS for my shared house. I needs to support 2x 2tb drives with hopefully expandable eSATA or USB port for an external hard drive. iTunes, bells and whistles would be nice.

I've looked round and unsure what are good brands and which ones are poor. Any suggestions?

[Professor Frink]

Is the Synology DS211j any good?

[blueball]

I have a synology NAS (407) and like their products. No experience of the 211 but as I said, happy with products and they produce regular upgrades to the OS.

[Professor Frink]

No one else with a NAS or an opinion?

[watercooled]

How about a home-made one like I have? I'm using an Intel Atom system running Debian.

[mycarsavw]

I've got a DS209j and a DS211 - both go above and beyond what you want them to do. Avoid the models prefixed with a "j" imho - they're budget versions. The 211 blows the 209j out the water

I've also got a DS408 which I've had for a few years - again, faultless

[CaptainCrash]

No one else with a NAS or an opinion?

HP Proliant Microserver

Ridiculous value for money at the special offer price, grab one while you still can.

[shufty84]

bought one of those on the 23rd, not arrived yet but i have 2 friends who are really happy with them, optical drive bay is a winner.
i'll be replacing my 2 LG NAS enclosures which are similar to this http://www.scan.co.uk/Search.aspx?q=LN30111
I found they struggled to stream bluray from disc across gigabit and also x264 from hard disks.

[bibio]

Hi, been tempted with HP Microserver since it was first posted.
But apart from the bulk of it, for a basic NAS like others have posted, is it really appropriate ? ie will it sleep, or hibernate well ? . It supposedly uses about 70watt, compared to the lower powered 20w or even less solutions. One of main advantages of leaving your PC off ?
I can't decide, don't know enough about the tech.


Cheers BOB

[d3fiant]

recently grabbed a DNS-320 for £70 and stuck a couple of 1TB drives in it, will take 2TB drives, its cheap but performance so far has been OK

[Professor Frink]

HP Proliant Microserver

Ridiculous value for money at the special offer price, grab one while you still can.

Good call, ordered one today. Now all I have to work out is how many hard drives to order.

[kompukare]

Hi, been tempted with HP Microserver since it was first posted.
But apart from the bulk of it, for a basic NAS like others have posted, is it really appropriate ? ie will it sleep, or hibernate well ? . It supposedly uses about 70watt, compared to the lower powered 20w or even less solutions. One of main advantages of leaving your PC off ?

If you're using FreeNAS (simplest) or pretty much any OS you set the drives to spin down after a certain amount of time. It then draws about 30-35W. Remember, most of that wattage is the HDDs and even the most frugal NAS is still going to use that power when they're all being accessed.

The PSU on that is 80+ but more annoyingly, it seems to be rather poor when off: I'll have to investigate more but I saw it using 14W on standby which is rather poor.

But anyway, for the price it sure beats any NAS with their limited embedded processors and firmware options.

[Caesium]

Hi, been tempted with HP Microserver since it was first posted.
But apart from the bulk of it, for a basic NAS like others have posted, is it really appropriate ? ie will it sleep, or hibernate well ? . It supposedly uses about 70watt, compared to the lower powered 20w or even less solutions.

70 watts? Where did you read that? My HP Microserver with no HDs in it (OS is on a USB stick to avoid power draw) uses 18 watts - with 3 2TB drives in (spinning) it uses 30 watts. Since they're set to spin down after 20 minutes it returns to 18 watts after a while.

[shufty84]

I'll also measure mine at the plug when my 4 2TB disks arrive, handy USB slot inside on the mobo to pop either an OS on or readyboost if you stick 7 on it. still torn on what OS to use on mine tbh.

I'll let you know the readings.

[watercooled]

If you're willing to get your hands dirty, I'm very happy running Debian Linux on my server - hugely customisable and very lightweight, only 29MB RAM usage when idle according to htop! Failing that you could use FreeNAS if you're only planning to use it as a file server. I personally wouldn't bother with a behemoth of an OS like Windows on a home file server, not only is it more expensive but you'll need more RAM and if you're planning on keeping the OS off the data disks, a bigger OS drive. FreeNAS is a piece of cake to set up.

[Chunkers]

I have a Synology DS211j which is a nice bit of kit and works very well and has a very good interface.

It certainly has less processing power and RAM than the DS211 or DS211+ but I wouldn't agree with the 'stay away' advice above, depends what you want it to do and whether you need the extra power.

Mine runs the NAS service, a Squeezebox server and shares media / video files over my modest home network (3 pc's, 2 laptops and various multimedia devices / TiVo / etc) without problems. On a gigabit network the transfer speeds are impressive - I haven't run into a bottleneck yet so I would say its adequate for my needs.

If you are a business user, have a need for more multitasking or are relaxed about the cost then I would understand why you might wish to pay more for more power and flexibility but I wouldn't dismiss
the 'j' models as they are cheaper and can offer good performance.

Decent review here :

http://www.testfreaks.com/blog/revie...tation-ds211j/

o/

Chunks