NAS for £300-400

Mort

Mort

Mort

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Hey all

Looking at NAS's and cant decide what to do. I have my eye on the Thecus 5200B, which is a 5 bay setup at about £350.

Just wondered if anyone else out there had any experience with it, or NAS's of a similar size / features?

It will be used for mainly home stuff, though I am a pretty excessive home user if I am honest ;) Will probably have daily backups from my home and work webserver, plus lots of video footage from my pretty new HD (1080p) camcorder, etc.

Another Q, is it best to save and buy all the hdd's at once (was looking at raid 5'ing, 5x1tb hdd), or start with say 2/3 in raid0 and then add the other disks and rebuild / convert the array later?
 
Build yourself a home server would be cheaper, and have greater throughput...

Ive just gone down the Windows Home Server route.. and must admit, I think its great!!! Alternatively, there are plenty of linux based distros to provide a NAS solution.. I personally like WHS as there is lots of pluggins for it, you can access it remotely over the web, and also access your home pc network via remote web conneciton. There is also great community support at www.wegotserved.co.uk

I spent a lot of time looking at NAS a while ago, and came to the conclusion that they are pretty poor, even gigabit NAS only offers marginally better transfer speeds than 100mbps connection...
 
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really?? I reckon after buying a Mobo / CPU / RAM, case, PSU, decent RAID card you are looking at at least the same cost as a NAS box, but its obviously going to be much bigger.

if i was going to do this i would probably want the case to either be a server rig, or some kind of custom job which is again more cost. can you give me the specs / costs of your box?
 
I think DrMekon is right - if it's throughput you need the choice is either an expensive pre-built NAS (one with a meaty processor) or a home-built solution. You're talking 5TB of storage then you want at least full gigabit speeds. My QNAP 210 is supposedly gigbit interface - well it is, but I can get only 8-12MB/sec transfers. A 509 will get you 45-50MB/sec but at considerably more cost. Even a modest PC-based solution will do better than that. It's not as compact of course. In my case I downgraded my 210 by taking out the big hard disks and it now just hosts music files, other common files that the network needs, and acts as a print, web and FTP server. I have another PC on the network now who's role it is to move big files around.

My spare PC (AKA NAS box) is an Opteron170 based machine, dual gigabit, space for 6 HDs (has 4 installed), and has just 2GB RAM. You can pick something like that up for way less cash than a 509.
 
its rare you get a motherboard that has onboard support for RAID 5 though, and if it does it will just be emulated raid5 and not proper raid

where as i gather the NAS boxes has real raid controllers?
 
Hi,
I have had a Qnap 409 Nas for a while now, I use 4 x 1TB drives configured as 4 independent drives.

I LOVE IT LONG TIME :-)
Config is pretty good (web page) I share all my media to different PC's around the house
I have sabnzbd installed for downloading news groups , its got ftp http download ability , its got loads of other features too many to mention.
Check out the Qnap site for more details
 
Hmm the Thecus is about the same price as the QNAP 409, but it has an extra bay, and better specs (CPU etc).

Still leaning towards the Thecus but still not sure now :P
 
I bought the thecus 5200pro after lots of research. Its tiny, sits in the corner & just works, never had a problem with it. Does approx 40-45% utilization over gigabit & uses 90 watts. Quite pricey though.
Yes I could have got a pc for probably a lot cheaper to do the same job, but i didnt want another big fat pc in my room.
 
Have you considered a WHS device instead of Raid? I was in a similar position to you and decided to go with a nas setup From tranquil (take a look at their Tranquil BBS2). You get a spec about 10 times more powerful than any prebuilt NAS and uses very little power due to the intel atom system (40-50 watts with hdds). The high spec makes it excellent for video usage and WHS is fantastic at doing pc backups
 
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