Comparing Synology 1010+, Thecus N7700, (QNap TS-559)??

[MrPete]

Here's my sense about these three NAS units and their manufacturers. Am I understanding correctly?

(Our need:
* NAS for two separate subnets, served on two gigabit ethernet NICs)
* On one subnet, serve one or two spool/cache folders for a failover pair of email servers (Macs running Postfix).
* On the other subnet, serve several SMB shares for a small multiuser workplace LAN. This will also be the network Master Browser and WINS server if at all possible.
* Ideally, this will also be an NTP server.
* Ultimate goal: lights-out reliability and performance.
)

Synology:
o Plus: great ease of config, usually great performance
o Minus: cheaper build quality

Thecus:
o Plus: reliable, great build quality, lots of modules available
o Minus: noisier, not quite as high performance

QNap:
o Plus: great performance, ease of config
o Minus: more costly, spotty tech support

If true, then my decision is mostly on just how noisy, slow and hard to configure the Thecus is. Thecus and Synology are about the same price right now.

What say you?

 

[kamina]

Ease of configuration is certainly important, but I would imagine none of these devices are very difficult to configure compared to traditional SAN devices... Also one could hope that it would not have to be configured very often given your purpose.

For noise too, I am imagining you will be using this in an office environment, even the noisier NAS devices should be very silent compared to a rack server. I would hope something like this would be put away so that nobody accidentally pulls of the cables / pushes the buttons, if so then noise should not be an issue.

Performance on the other hand might be an issue. Postfix will probably be using loads of tiny files which is generally not what these devices excel in. All these devices have so few disks that you will possibly be using the same disk array for both postfix and samba. What this will cause, is that all the tiny files created / read by postfix will cause a lot of seeks which will disturb the samba use a lot (unless you can prioritize, but that would require more memory for the NAS).

You are not mentioning anything about the amount of users or traffic, but for my work place I would aim at getting a device that would allow creating two arrays, so that the postfix and samba would be using separate spindles. With this they would not bother each other at all in regards to disk IO.

 

[MrPete]

That's good thinking, kamina!

You guessed right on several counts. We have a small "tech room" where this will be located. As long as it is not significantly noisier than a normal desktop PC, not a problem at all. In fact, it is replacing a desktop-sized old Dell server.

In our case, performancewise this is mostly overkill as we're doing proof-of-concept for others who will want to mimic what we've done. However, several of your points carry significant weight.

We only have 2-6 people in the office at a given moment, and usually not heavy LAN file use. So in that sense, local network performance should not be a huge drain. However, when we need it, we need it

Email is another story. Some of our domains have been around soooo long, we get a ton of hits. Worst case (ignoring the multiple simultaneous email-DOS attacks, which we auto-firewall), we can have quite a few simultaneous email attempts per second. So we do need good email performance.

To that end, having the ability to do both RAID 6 and RAID 1 in the same box could be a benefit. And only one of these has that capacity.

[FWIW, we're going to spool/cache email on the NAS because our new proof-of-concept email servers are a pair of Mac Mini servers... sealed units. For security purposes, we don't like the idea of having sensitive email info on drives in a sealed server.]

 

[ntm1275]

o Minus: cheaper build quality

The DS1010+ is all metal apart from the from plastic face plate and drive trays

Unless you intend to be pulling the drive trays in and out all the time, I wouldn't see a problem with them being plastic

The only time you would need to touch the drive trays is when a disk fails, and that probably isn't going to be very often

 

[kamina]

You might want to look at getting something like raptors for disks if you can live with the small capacity, though since you mention using an old Dell before I assume you will be fine (scsi or ide?). Maybe use iostat to periodically check The iops on The current system (run from cron every hour). Should give some pointers to how heavy The load is.

 

[NetworkStorageTips]

Any reason you don't include Netgear ReadyNAS in your comparison? NVX is excellent for 4 bay, Pro Business Edition fantastic 6 bay.

They are a minus on price, but part of that is due to the enterprise drives they put in many models (1TB and over).

Their tech support is excellent, reliability & quality very high.

Best,
Roger.

 

[MrPete]

RNDP600E-100NAS ReadyNAS NVX Pro 6-bay diskless...

What I see: costly, very spotty support. Significant fraction of frustrated customers (check out NewEgg reviews for example.)

Otherwise, it looked interesting!

 

[NetworkStorageTips]

That's the wrong one, that's the Pioneer Edition, which I do NOT recommend.

6 bay:
RNDP6310, RNDP6350 (I would not get because of only 500MB disks), RNDP6610, RNDP6620

are the ReadyNAS Pro Business Edition

4 bay: (NVX)
RNDX4210, RNDX4410, etc

Those are class acts, and if there is any question of support, head to the ReadyNAS forums and you will find ample support from other users if the company drops the ball.

Again, my advice is to avoid Pioneer Edition.

Best,
Roger.

 

[MrPete]

IIRC, I picked out the Pioneer/NVX due to significant "vigorous discussion" among folks over whether the newest (and still more costly) Pro Biz version is more stable, or whether to stick with the older NVX.

Admittedly, a bit confusing trying to sort it all out...which is part of what put me off the ReadyNAS line in the first place. (Love netgear in general though!)

That's part of what makes this interesting. If a vendor is releasing NAS products you can't recommend at all... what confidence can we have in the latest-and-greatest version before it even has any user reviews on any reseller sites?

In any case, that's quite a price premium...
http://www.eaegis.com/netgear-readynas-pro-business-edition-diskless-nas-rndp6000.aspx

... particularly for a box that even in the SNB retest has less-than-stellar RAID 5 performance:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_nas&Itemid=&chart=15
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_nas&Itemid=&chart=14

(We plan to use mostly for RAID 6...)

 

[NetworkStorageTips]

Admittedly, a bit confusing trying to sort it all out...which is part of what put me off the ReadyNAS line in the first place. (Love netgear in general though!)

Definitely confusing...

One of the reasons we started NetworkStorageTips.com was precisely for those reasons:
1) We love Netgear
2) It is hard to sort out and thought others might benefit from us doing some of the heavy lifting.

As for a company with a product I can't recommend, almost every vendor has that.

Sometimes you don't recommend the product because they cut a feature, sometimes because the price/value isn't there, other times because they came up with a lemon. Sometimes they think they have to offer a product simply because they think it's what the market wants.

Best,
Roger.