Want to smash my ReadyNAS NV+!!!

[Turick]

So I've never been happy with this thing and I just got a lot unhappier...

My family uses my HTPC constantly in our living room as our main source of watching tv shows and movies stored on my NAS. Occasionally, the HTPC processes large files and moves them to the NAS. When this happens while we're streaming from the NAS, XBMC starts buffering and chopping really bad.

I posted a thread over on anandtech about possibilities for setting up routing on win 7 to use different nics for read/write, which was quickly shot down. It was there I discovered that really the max throughput the processor on this piece of crap NAS can handle is about 36MB/s. A far cry from what my gigabit network should be able to handle.

All tricks aside, the only really good solution is a new NAS. I really don't want to spend a bunch of money, but I guess nobody does, and you get what you pay for. My ReadyNAS has 4 2TB WD Red 7200 RPM hard drives which I'll be looking to re-use.

Looking at the NAS ranker on this site, it appears the Synology DS412+ has the best performance for a 4 bay drive and costs $600. Some of the features on it sound a bit cheesy, although my NAS currently sits in the basement out of site and I never really interact with it since I set it up, so I guess I don't need a bunch of features.

Just wanted to see if anybody could confirm that this is the right model to jump into or if there are others I should consider first.

Thanks!

 

[stevech]

I like my DS212 and the DSM software.

Perhaps a two-bay NAS will do, say with 2x3TB. For the sake of cost. Mine has 2x2TB and I have not filled half in the year or so I've used it. I don't use RAID; instead each drive is a separate volume. One is primary with the LAN shares, the other gets a copy of important folders on the primary via the DSM utilities, automated. I also backup the new/changed VIP files from the NAS to a USB3 drive daily.

QNAP has a new 2 bay NAS to look at as well.

 

[Turick]

Well I just realized the bulk of my problem is that my HTPC is not just streaming files from my NAS, but downloading, processing, and copying files back to my NAS. With a weak processor in my NAS, it is a major bottleneck that doesn't come close to the actual networking bandwidth on my gigabit network.

The problem is that my HTPC is not just designated for watching files from the NAS, but also downloading files from the internet, processing them, and moving them back to the NAS. If all that work were off-loaded, this problem wouldn't exist.

I think the smartest decision I could make is to build a budget PC to serve as the NAS that has more processing power than my current NAS, let that run the apps that I have to download and process files that currently reside on my HTPC. That relieves my HTPC from ever reading and writing at the same time, increases the processing power of my NAS to read and write (even though at that point it's not really necessary), and would probably be a lot cheaper... I can use an old video card, my existing hard drives... all I'll need is a cheap case, mobo, RAM, and processor.

Any advice/links anybody could provide for building this type of solution would be greatly appreciated.

 

[stevech]

I wonder.. moving files, downloading/storing files... are not CPU intensive tasks. Unless your NAS has an inefficient network interface and stack. But usually, these kinds of tasks are disk limited.

 

[Turick]

All of the processing limitation talk comes from my discussions on anandtech. Feel free to check it out and let me know if you disagree. I value your opinion highly, so if you have more input I would love to hear it!

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2352439