NSLU2 vs dedicated NAS

steinooo

steinooo

steinooo

Soldato
Joined
31 Dec 2003
Posts
4,761
Location
Stoke on Trent
Hi all,

I want to buy network attached storage for a place for data backups and media files to share to networked media players in the house, but don't know whether to get a NSLU2 router and have Linux on it (so I can run a webserver, FTP server, have download clients running) , or whether to just get a dedicated NAS.

Has anyone got any experience of using an NSLU2 as a NAS, or any thoughts please? :)

thanks in advance
 
I have a couple of NSLU2's , they were great about 3 years ago
not so good now , vastly underpowered and slow
I went to a Qnap 409 and I love it to bits

They do make nice paperweights tho
 
I'd agree the NSLU2's were good a few years ago and myself included had one but Qnap is definately the way to go, I've got 3 Qnap 209's and wouldn't swap them for anything (well nearly anything)
After all everything is in one box with the Qnap or similar.
 
thanks for the responses. These devices all seem very good, especially like the look of the Qnap kit. Seem quite pricey though, I was hoping to get something sub £100 really, any ideas whether that's even possible?

Also - Are there such devices as NAS' with NZB downloading support from Newsgroups? Or are BitTorrents the primary downloading platform on these?

Cheers.
 
stokefan said:
thanks for the responses. These devices all seem very good, especially like the look of the Qnap kit. Seem quite pricey though, I was hoping to get something sub £100 really, any ideas whether that's even possible?

Also - Are there such devices as NAS' with NZB downloading support from Newsgroups? Or are BitTorrents the primary downloading platform on these?

Cheers.
Click to expand...

The netgear readynas duo can be had as a bare unit for around £140 now I believe and isn't a bad unit. Not the quickest, but been using it for 6 months or so and it's been good.

It has a basic torrent client built in but you can download apps for it, I've also got nzbget installed on it.
 
may i but in for a second, why would you choose one of the nas boxes that are above £200 over a home built cheap pc to use as a server? is it cost to run?
 
For me it was power usage, hassle factor (was easier to just buy a nas appliance than spend time sorting something else :) ), size, features like RAID etc. Plus I could get away with this whereas another pc like device the wife might have had something to say... :p

I did also upgrade the memory in the duo to a gig as it made a difference in how snappy things ran.
 
Last edited:
I also now run a QNAP NAS for the power consumption and it's flexibility..

On idle, it's under 10W which means leaving it on 24/7 is not so expensive..

My previous mini-ITX drew just over 60W on average, I replaced it with a full on 10 Bay Full PC server which drew 130W on idle)..

if you look at the electricity usage if left on 24/7, and assuming a lowish rate of 12p per KwH..
10W = 87.6KwH/year = £10.12
60W = 525.6KwH/Year = £63.08
130W = 1138.8 KwH/Year = £136.37

I only went for the QNAP because it's one of the NAS's that has easy methods of installing other applications, and comes with a raft pre-installed..
 
I did consider building my own unit and faffing around with either unRAID or some other hardware or software solution, but I came accross a lot of horror stories with harware failures and all data being lost etc. If my ReadyNAS pro fails in any way support can either dial on to recover the data, or I can send the unit back and have it all rebuilt etc etc. Worth paying a bit more I felt for that kind of peace of mind.
 
A more modern replacement for the NSLU2 would be the sheevaplug. Its a better fit for your budget, comes with a standard ubuntu 9.04, and has better hardware than a lot of NASes (1.3GHz CPU and 512MB of ram).
 
kaltrop said:
A more modern replacement for the NSLU2 would be the sheevaplug. Its a better fit for your budget, comes with a standard ubuntu 9.04, and has better hardware than a lot of NASes (1.3GHz CPU and 512MB of ram).
Click to expand...

Just had a look at that.. it's a development kit, not an off-the-shelf pre-configured unit ready for network streaming with a nice Web front end..

Not bad for the price, but the newer QNAP models etc use 1.2Ghz Marvell processors as well, but are more like £250 instead of £110, but then you do get a full on NAS for that..

Unless you are very proficient with Linux, I'd not recommend it at all, for hardly any more, an Atom based mini-PC would probably be even easier, and it has a graphics card to allow easier use!
 
Demon said:
Not bad for the price, but the newer QNAP models etc use 1.2Ghz Marvell processors as well, but are more like £250 instead of £110, but then you do get a full on NAS for that..
Click to expand...

The new TS-x59 models have a dual core 1.66GHz Atom D510. :cool:

If they're out of budget, there's always the TS-x39 range with a single core 1.6GHz Atom, these should be dropping in price soon too. The TS-x39's have about double the read/write performance of the boxes using the Marvell chip.
 
Demon said:
Just had a look at that.. it's a development kit, not an off-the-shelf pre-configured unit ready for network streaming with a nice Web front end..
Click to expand...

Thats true, though anyone considering an NSLU2 is going to spending a lot of time mucking about with linux.

Myself i went with a MSI Nettop, which was about £120. Its basically the motherboard from an MSI wind netbook in a slimline chassis, that has a 3.5 and a 5.25 bay. It can boot from the compact flash slot on the M/B, so you've a nice choice of linux or BSDs to run on it.

I find the the QNAP stuff pretty expensive in comparison. The TS-239 Pro is £400!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom