Spec me a NAS for under £200..

Defy Belief

Defy Belief

Defy Belief

Soldato
Joined
29 Sep 2010
Posts
6,151
Morning all :)

So I'm in the market for a NAS, it doesn't need to be super high end, 2 bay is fine,

main two purposes are;

Local backup for photos,
Shared storage for my ESXi cluster, to support vmotion/drs etc.

I will not be using anything like plex, so the app suites they all come with etc, aren't really important to me.

I have been looking at either the Synology DS220j, QNAP TS-231K, QNAP TS-230, Asustor AS1102T.

I've also found a very nicely priced Drobo 5N, which is obviously 5 bay, but is a bit of a risk being second hand, but would be interested to get some thoughts on what people would recommend. :)
 
From what I've read, Drobo is best avoided. The others all seem pretty equal with the TS-231K trailing slightly (the TS-230 is EOL, consider the TS-233 instead) but I'd go for the AS1102T as it has a 2.5Gb/s LAN port which is better for the future. I admit to a soft spot for Asustor NAS as they do seem to provide more hardware for the money.

I will be selling my AS5304T in the near future but it'll be 50% over your budget and just mentioned to tempt you. ;)
 
Never heard of Asustor before but they look really good especially for the price.

I'd personally be thinking quite hard before buying anything storage related from QNAP. I used to be a big fan but they've made things difficult for themselves by using simple hardcoded passwords in some apps.
 
Yeah, I was juggling the thought of either the 2.5Gb/s or the dual Gb ports in the likes of the QNAP, speed vs redundancy (But also 2Gb/s is then not also far off 2.5 if I did dual links), though not the end of the world if a port on my Cisco switch dies and also pretty unlikely too! Edit i've been a numpty here though as my 3560cg is a 1G switch so i'm better off with dual gig links than a 2.5 anyway.

Ha ha, i'm in the market now sadly :p and would rather buy new I think
 
Last edited:
ChrisD. said:
Never heard of Asustor before but they look really good especially for the price.

I'd personally be thinking quite hard before buying anything storage related from QNAP. I used to be a big fan but they've made things difficult for themselves by using simple hardcoded passwords in some apps.
Click to expand...
Yeah, new to me too, but they seem to review well and seems a decent spec for the price, plus with a voucher I got from the inlaws for the rainforest makes it only £110.
 
Defy Belief said:
Yeah, new to me too, but they seem to review well and seems a decent spec for the price, plus with a voucher I got from the inlaws for the rainforest makes it only £110.
Click to expand...
Definitely worth a shot. The UI doesn't look as polished as DSM but like you say, specs and reviews look decent.
 
Defy Belief said:
Yeah, I was juggling the thought of either the 2.5Gb/s or the dual Gb ports in the likes of the QNAP, speed vs redundancy (But also 2Gb/s is then not also far off 2.5 if I did dual links), though not the end of the world if a port on my Cisco switch dies and also pretty unlikely too! Edit i've been a numpty here though as my 3560cg is a 1G switch so i'm better off with dual gig links than a 2.5 anyway.

Ha ha, i'm in the market now sadly :p and would rather buy new I think
Click to expand...
Dualling 1Gb/s ports will not give you 2Gb/s to a single client, only 1Gb/s to two clients.

Asustor was founded in 2011 when Asus poached QNAP's development team..... So they're hardly new to the game.
 
Snapshot said:
Dualling 1Gb/s ports will not give you 2Gb/s to a single client, only 1Gb/s to two clients.

Asustor was founded in 2011 when Asus poached QNAP's development team..... So they're hardly new to the game.
Click to expand...
Ah ok, that works ok though, as I have 3 clients in the cluster, so would be better than a sole 2.5Gb link.

There is this in b grade too - https://www.overclockers.co.uk/-b-g...e-cpu-network-attached-storage-bg-9dd-as.html

Looks like it's got a decent celeron dual core, not sure whether a quad @ 1.4 or a dual at (upto) 2.5ghz would be better for longevity, has double the ram, dual port (Image is wrong)
 
Ah, they're ASUS. I'd probably give them a wide birth if their attitude to security on routers is the same as security on NAS devices.
 
Snapshot said:
Dualling 1Gb/s ports will not give you 2Gb/s to a single client, only 1Gb/s to two clients.

Asustor was founded in 2011 when Asus poached QNAP's development team..... So they're hardly new to the game.
Click to expand...

In some setups you can get 2Gbps from 2 links, MPIO/Multipath etc. So if this is being used for VM with iSCSI etc you'll get it.
 
Defy Belief said:
This is why I've mainly looked into more depth on the qnaps, as they're more enterprise than the others listed
Click to expand...
From memory, on QNAP you'd have to put each PNIC into its own switch to get iSCSI multipathing to work. With a different subnet. But things may have changed, I ditched QNAP a few months ago after using them for years due to plain weird performance issues.
 
ChrisD. said:
From memory, on QNAP you'd have to put each PNIC into its own switch to get iSCSI multipathing to work. With a different subnet. But things may have changed, I ditched QNAP a few months ago after using them for years due to plain weird performance issues.
Click to expand...
That's weird, I only have one switch, so will look into that, cheers for the heads up
 
ChrisD. said:
Sorry, should have clarified. I mean the virtual switch within the QNAP.
Click to expand...
Ah, ok :) thats not so bad.

Just noticed that the asrock desk mini barebones units, for the ryzen chips, have 2*2.5" or 2*nvme slots, with raid 1 support, pretty cool and I could just put TrueNAS on it, but think the power consumption will be quite a bit higher than a dedicated NAS.
 
Defy Belief said:
Ah, ok :) thats not so bad.

Just noticed that the asrock desk mini barebones units, for the ryzen chips, have 2*2.5" or 2*nvme slots, with raid 1 support, pretty cool and I could just put TrueNAS on it, but think the power consumption will be quite a bit higher than a dedicated NAS.
Click to expand...
I have TrueNAS on my QNAP and my own custom box. Be aware that with Core not all NICs will work due to it being based on FreeBSD. I don't think it sees the 2.5 Gbps NIC on my 5600G based build.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom