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. :)
 
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
 
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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.
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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.
 
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.
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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)
 
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.
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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.
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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.
 
I've ended up buying a HP ec200a server, which can house 2*3.5" HDDs but has far more grunt, but still lower power than all the NAS machines I was looking at, will be giving TRUENAS a go on it :)
 
ChrisD. said:
It'll also use far more power, if it has the Xeon-D they are not known for being frugal for electricity usage.
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Worded that completely wrong :) still 'low power' but not lower power than the nas machines :D

They appear to idle at around 24-27w and max is about 60w, higher than the 8w idle - 15w ish load you'll get with a nas, but its not going to be hugely expensive to run. I bought 2, so I might end up using these are my esxi hosts at some point so gives me a bit of flexibility.
 
They're here :) they're very small, the one fan on the one machine is pretty grindy where the bearings must be going, so I'm going to replace that.

Just awaiting my ram, nvme and drives and will use the other as an esxi host



 
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