first time bas buyer qnap ts210 or synology ds209?

[extrafuzzyllama]

hi all i will be buyinf my first nas
i cant decide which to get either the qnap ts210 or the synology ds209

i will be using it to keep all my media like music movies and pictures and also want to stream 1080 movies from it as well as a itunea server

i want to know also if they have isb expansion?
can i attach external drives via usb to add additional storage space?

and what format do they use ntfs, hfs?

 

[luddy]

All I can say is QNAP support sucks.

 

[HDClown]

Either one will serve your purpose. Synology has a fancy new Java based GUI coming out (currently in beta) if you are into that kind of stuff. QNAP affords more tweaker capabilites largely due to the aftermarket community putting more involvement into it.

QNAP support stories vary from "best in the world" to "horrible". I don't know if Synology has the same range. It seems like they are more consistant in the upper end of good to excellent.

You can expand storage via external USB/eSATA drives on the QNAP. Each device will show up as a unique, dedicated share in the management GUI for you to define security on, and it shows up as a single share over the network. I'm sure Synology does this as well, fairly basic feature of most NAS units these days.

They both run Linux and use EXT file system. QNAP supports EXT3 and EXT4. Synology's 3.0 software supports EXT4 now.

You can access either unit over network via Samba/CIFS, AFP, and NFS.

Coming from a QNAP owner, Synology's UI and associated UI access features are most certainly ahead of QNAP, and that puts them in a very favorable position. If I where going to buy something again today, I'd heavily re-consider Synology. At the time, Synology didn't have a product on market that matched what I was looking for, so I got the QNAP. It's been solid and reliable, so no complaints here.

 

[PowerMAC]

Either one will serve your purpose. Synology has a fancy new Java based GUI coming out (currently in beta) if you are into that kind of stuff. QNAP affords more tweaker capabilites largely due to the aftermarket community putting more involvement into it.

QNAP support stories vary from "best in the world" to "horrible". I don't know if Synology has the same range. It seems like they are more consistant in the upper end of good to excellent.

You can expand storage via external USB/eSATA drives on the QNAP. Each device will show up as a unique, dedicated share in the management GUI for you to define security on, and it shows up as a single share over the network. I'm sure Synology does this as well, fairly basic feature of most NAS units these days.

They both run Linux and use EXT file system. QNAP supports EXT3 and EXT4. Synology's 3.0 software supports EXT4 now.

You can access either unit over network via Samba/CIFS, AFP, and NFS.

Coming from a QNAP owner, Synology's UI and associated UI access features are most certainly ahead of QNAP, and that puts them in a very favorable position. If I where going to buy something again today, I'd heavily re-consider Synology. At the time, Synology didn't have a product on market that matched what I was looking for, so I got the QNAP. It's been solid and reliable, so no complaints here.

Agreed, as another QNAP owner I feel exactly the same way as you ...

Synology has made significant improvements lately. Synology's new multi-tasking user interface is way ahead of QNAP's and it's looking very slick and polished! Synology also already supports RAID 10 and even Hybrid RAID where you can mix different sized harddisks to create an optimal-sized storage volume. Synology now also already supports Windows ACL permissions and lastly they have just released a great new app called Synology Time Backup that does automatic versioning and backups in the background!

Competition is a good thing, so for my next purchase I will definitely consider Synology first.