1st Timer: D-Link, Netgear, Synology or Thecus?

[darkarn]

Hi, I am looking around for a new storage device and got quite... confused to say the least, so need some help here to sort out my thoughts

Situation
Currently, I have three HDDs:

1. Hitachi 3TB: My main HDD in a USB 3.0 enclosure that I always plug into my laptop
2. Seagate 1TB: Sitting inside my family's PC as backup for the 3TB
3. Samsung 2TB: Sitting inside my family's PC as backup for the 3TB

My workflow is Laptop>HDD 1>HDD 2/3 (Depending on what I am working on)

I want to shift HDDs 2 and 3 out of the PC to free up the SATA ports a bit and to avoid a case whereby if the PC goes down, my backup also goes down (almost happened last week, thankfully it was just a case of having to reseat SATA cables that was preventing some of the HDDs from being detected properly). I also thought that now might be a good time to upgrade a little .

I am working with a budget of S$150 and prefer no RAID/JBOS whenever possible.

Options
I decided to give NAS a shot (since I have been eyeing NAS for some time and wanted to give that technology a try) and found several options:

1. D-Link DNS-320L (S$99). I was quite surprised at being able to get a NAS for this cheap, as a nice way to start playing around with NAS. But I have been hearing not so good things about it like the unit dying off easily and that it is the slowest according to the ranker here; is this the case all the time?

2. D-Link DNS-327L (S$159). This option is pushing my budget a little but the USB 3.0 port can be handy as I do have an USB 3.0 HDD enclosure that can work with that. The lack of reviews and SmallNetBuilder not reviewing it yet makes comparison a little tough though...

Seeing how things are, I asked myself if I can go expand my budget by at most S$50 and found these options:

3. NETGEAR RN10200 ReadyNAS 102 (S$219) Has three years of warranty, which comes in handy (compared to the others which has only two years). Looks like a good all-rounder with decent apps and speeds.

4. Synology DS214se (S$207) Quite impressed with the software and OS for this device. It is just too bad that there is no USB 3.0 port.

5. Thecus N2310 (S$199) Fastest I have seen so far, quite impressive. No iSCSI though, will that affect anything?

tl;dr, strong points of each model:
D-Link: Price point
Thecus: Raw speed
Synology: OS
Netgear: All-rounder

Either way, for all 5 options, I realise that I will need to change my workflow a little (i.e. NAS first and then backup to USB enclosure using the USB port) and that accessing the NAS via Ethernet will be slower. I also will need to reformat both HDDs, which means there will be a short period of time when my data will be vulnerable. May I know how much this reduction of speed is in real-world conditions?

Other Questions
1. Are my analysis of the options correct or am I missing something?
2. If using NAS, when the NAS goes down, can I use Parted Magic on my laptop to access the HDDs (after pulling out from the NAS)?

Thanks for reading this long post and hope to hear from you all soon

 

[stevech]

Synology or QNAP.
None others. Esp. D-Link, LG. Seagate NAS. I'm not big on Netgear - support and OS.
Thecus - seemingly not popular with home/consumers vs. SOHO or media pros.

 

[darkarn]

Synology or QNAP.
None others. Esp. D-Link, LG. Seagate NAS. I'm not big on Netgear - support and OS.
Thecus - seemingly not popular with home/consumers vs. SOHO or media pros.

Thanks for the fast response! Hmmm... I am not sure why I should not use the Netgear or the Thecus in this case; what's stopping me from getting the Synology is that it is the slowest out of the three. May I know why I should still stick with Synology?

Also, to overcome the lack of USB 3.0 port, is it possible to just map the NAS as a network drive to my Windows 7 laptop (which have 2 USB 3.0 ports) and then use FreeFileSync between the USB 3.0 drive and the NAS?

 

[htismaqe]

Don't learn this lesson the hard way. Cheap NAS' are cheap for a reason.

I had a ZyXEL NSA310 that was half the price of my QNAP TS-112P. Similar 1.6Ghz Marvell processor and everything.

The QNAP barely touches 50% CPU under heavy file copy load. The ZyXEL would crash anytime I tried to load it up from more than 2 machines.

If your concern with the Synology is the lack of interfaces, you might look at QNAP. Mine has USB3 and eSATA external ports.

What really sets Synology and QNAP apart (from Netgear and Thecus, for example) is the OS/software.

 

[darkarn]

Don't learn this lesson the hard way. Cheap NAS' are cheap for a reason.

I had a ZyXEL NSA310 that was half the price of my QNAP TS-112P. Similar 1.6Ghz Marvell processor and everything.

The QNAP barely touches 50% CPU under heavy file copy load. The ZyXEL would crash anytime I tried to load it up from more than 2 machines.

If your concern with the Synology is the lack of interfaces, you might look at QNAP. Mine has USB3 and eSATA external ports.

What really sets Synology and QNAP apart (from Netgear and Thecus, for example) is the OS/software.

Thanks! I did not consider the QNAPs as they were around 300 bucks at least. I also didn't know that the OS can affect things like CPU usage too (thought that this is more of a hardware implementation issue)

I still will like to know about going around that USB 3.0 issue

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
If your main object is only reliable file handling and back up any one will do but need more than that then major popular NAS is QNAP or Synology.

 

[darkarn]

Hi,
If your main object is only reliable file handling and back up any one will do but need more than that then major popular NAS is QNAP or Synology.

Yeah, that was my plan at first, but when I started reading up about NASes, I thought maybe I should try out the other features too

 

[mdgm]

I am working with a budget of S$150 and prefer no RAID/JBOS whenever possible.

That's not recommended. If a disk fails with important data on it then you better hope your backup e.g. a USB is O.K. and is up to date, or be prepared to pay for a data recovery attempt that may not be successful. RAID doesn't replace the need for backups, but it is still useful. If a disk fails when using RAID-1 the data should still be on the other disk.

3. NETGEAR RN10200 ReadyNAS 102 (S$219) Has three years of warranty, which comes in handy (compared to the others which has only two years). Looks like a good all-rounder with decent apps and speeds.

The hardware build quality of the ReadyNAS is one of its strengths and we build them to last. So we are able to offer a longer warranty than the ones you mentioned that only have 2 years.

Other Questions
If using NAS, when the NAS goes down, can I use Parted Magic on my laptop to access the HDDs (after pulling out from the NAS)?

NAS units tend to run Linux and use filesystems such as EXT4 or BTRFS. Recovering data would work best using an ordinary x86 Linux machine or perhaps some software for Windows though this may not be free.

But data recovery really is a last resort and may only be partially successful if anything. If your data is important then paid data recovery services are a better option than trying to fix it yourself as you could easily make things worse. But then considering that data recovery may be very expensive, and may be completely unsuccessful or partially successful, you really should backup your data. Multiple backups with at least one copy off-site at all times should give you a decent level of protection.

If your NAS fails out of warranty you may also be able to move the disks across to a similar model. You should ask for advice on this if you choose this as there may be important things you should consider especially if this is several years down the track as things may have changed a lot in that time.

I am not sure why I should not use the Netgear or the Thecus

Some users prefer different brands over others. Users tend to recommend what they like and what they are used to.

Opinions as to what OS/software is better are very subjective, much like whether your prefer having a client machine running Windows or Mac OS X or Linux. There's things such as Ease of use, Security, Reliability, App Availability, Features etc. and how much weight you put on different ones of these can also affect opinions on the quality of different OS/software.

Hardware build quality, warranty, support etc. are important.

Don't learn this lesson the hard way. Cheap NAS' are cheap for a reason.

They are good for basic needs. Doing a small number of things and doing them well, but it is important not to overload them just like you wouldn't want to overload any PC.

Yeah, that was my plan at first, but when I started reading up about NASes, I thought maybe I should try out the other features too

You will find that with cheaper devices that if you want to run too much at once it won't cope so well. Different price points are suitable for different work loads.

 

[darkarn]

That's not recommended. If a disk fails with important data on it then you better hope your backup e.g. a USB is O.K. and is up to date, or be prepared to pay for a data recovery attempt that may not be successful. RAID doesn't replace the need for backups, but it is still useful. If a disk fails when using RAID-1 the data should still be on the other disk.

The hardware build quality of the ReadyNAS is one of its strengths and we build them to last. So we are able to offer a longer warranty than the ones you mentioned that only have 2 years.

NAS units tend to run Linux and use filesystems such as EXT4 or BTRFS. Recovering data would work best using an ordinary x86 Linux machine or perhaps some software for Windows though this may not be free.

But data recovery really is a last resort and may only be partially successful if anything. If your data is important then paid data recovery services are a better option than trying to fix it yourself as you could easily make things worse. But then considering that data recovery may be very expensive, and may be completely unsuccessful or partially successful, you really should backup your data. Multiple backups with at least one copy off-site at all times should give you a decent level of protection.

If your NAS fails out of warranty you may also be able to move the disks across to a similar model. You should ask for advice on this if you choose this as there may be important things you should consider especially if this is several years down the track as things may have changed a lot in that time.

Some users prefer different brands over others. Users tend to recommend what they like and what they are used to.

Opinions as to what OS/software is better are very subjective, much like whether your prefer having a client machine running Windows or Mac OS X or Linux. There's things such as Ease of use, Security, Reliability, App Availability, Features etc. and how much weight you put on different ones of these can also affect opinions on the quality of different OS/software.

Hardware build quality, warranty, support etc. are important.


They are good for basic needs. Doing a small number of things and doing them well, but it is important not to overload them just like you wouldn't want to overload any PC.

You will find that with cheaper devices that if you want to run too much at once it won't cope so well. Different price points are suitable for different work loads.

Thanks for the long post! Let me try to break it down a little:

1. I am already using an USB 3.0 enclosure with a HDD as a backup.
2. As for using a Linux machine, I do understand that using an Ubuntu live CD will work too. And in this case, this is assuming that the HDDs are working but the NAS is not.
3. Point taken, thanks for reminding me about the work loads; kept forgetting that the NAS is like a computer too

 

[darkarn]

Quick update: The DS215J that was just launched seems to be the perfect tie-breaker for this situation...

But after more discussions with my friend, I decided to hold until when I can get the NAS and proper NAS-ready HDDs as a bundle, I hope that's a good decision...

Meanwhile I just hang in there with another USB enclosure

 

[htismaqe]

They are good for basic needs. Doing a small number of things and doing them well, but it is important not to overload them just like you wouldn't want to overload any PC.

If by a "small number" you mean ONE, then yes, I agree with you.

Because ONE is the number of tasks I found the ZyXEL NSA310 could reliably handle at any given time...