Hi All,
I've had file servers at home for many years and am looking to upgrade (Or downgrade) my current set up as the better half wants something smaller.
I'm currently running a Windows based PC, 8 gig of ram, AMD A8 in a Chenbro 8 bay case, with 8 x 3tb drives and a rocket-raid raid card which she wants GONE.
It's been fantastic and I've been using programs like PS3 Media Server (For PS3) and Stream 2 Me (For apple devices both locally and remotely) and VNC to administer it.
Without boring you with everything that I use it for, the above is a bit of a background for my requirements.
I recently found a QNAP TS-EC880 but missed out on it at auction and now I'm tempted to just fork out the extra $$ for the performance of this unit. But it is a HUGE price difference (More than double a Synology 1815+)
I've never actually owned a simple purpose manufactured NAS and am a little worried about the freedom and flexibility I may lose with leaving Windows behind, not to mention the power/performance I may lose swapping to something mass produced.
I'm just reaching out to the OZB community for any feedback (Good and bad), ideas, thoughts or general input into this purchase. I've already got the hard drives (6tb WD's).
I'll be looking for something preferably in an 8 bay (Like QNAP TS-EC880, Synology 1815+) or 5-6 bay depending on performance and price.
I understand that the EC880 is not a fair comparison to the 1815+ (One being a Xeon based unit), but I like the QNAP for upgradability (Eg- processor or ram upgrade, whereas Synology models some are limited to 6gb of ram), but I also like what I've read about Synology operating system and availability of apps.
Any feedback would be great as I've never used any of this style of device, thanks for a great website!!
Buy once, cry once. Go with a Synology, I have a DS1010 (5 bay) about 3-4 years old running SHR+2 drive redundancy with 3TB drives, it'll saturate my gigabit ethernet (around 100MB/s) while still recording surveillance from 2 cameras, downloading and streaming. Works with our Apple computers which do time machine backups to it too.
Don't be tempted with processor upgrades, if you open the unit up you'll void the warranty and they're all about the same speed/spec for processors. My DS1010 which has an ancient Dual Core 1.6Ghz Atom CPU never goes past 10% unless it has to transcode a video stream to my mother's iPad which it does just fine. 2-4GB of RAM is more than enough for a NAS, most of it will go into cache and when you're talking about physical drives RAM runs circles around them so the system will always be hungry for data from the hard drives before the RAM would run out.
Software and interface is where Synology shines through, regular updates, inbuilt package center, great UI, and they still support their legacy units even with the latest DSM.
Realistically, you're a home user/power user. You'll be running gigabit ethernet at most so you're limited to 100MB/s sustained read/write which will only happen if you're putting a heap of stuff (read:movies) on there or copying them off. The other 98% of the time it'll be idling away.