Hi,
I'm looking at getting a NAS primarily for media storage and bittorrent downloading, as well as backing up my music and photo collection. I have a Mac laptop, not a desktop, so performance isn't really an issue on a daily basis, as I'll be limited by my wireless connection speed, not the speed of the NAS. Of course on the initial transfer I'll use a wired connection.
I bought a Buffalo Linkstation at Fry's just to get familiarized with a NAS, to see what I liked and what I didn't. (I'll be returning it shortly.) I was disappointed with the bittorrent functionality in particular. The Linkstation lacked RSS support, and you had to load each torrent one by one. I'd prefer a way to select and load multiple torrents, or even better, for the NAS to be able to monitor a folder and automatically load any new torrent in that folder to the queue.
In looking through this site and the forums, I've narrowed my choices down to QNAP TS110 or TS112 or Synology DS110j or DS211j. They're close in price, and in features, but I can't decide. The DS211j has two bays, which is nice from a future-proofing standpoint. I'm going to start off with a single 2 or 3 TB drive whichever NAS I get.
So here are my questions:
1) Is there any way to connect a NAS directly to a computer, without a router as intermediary? I don't have a gigabit router, just a 10/100, so any file transfer that has to go through my router would be limited to 100 mb/s. It's
2) Of the NAS units I'm considering, which has the best bittorrent support? In particular, I'm interested in RSS, scheduling, bandwidth control, remote (web or smartphone app) control of BT client, in-client torrent searching, and general ease of use. Being able to use different clients, like Transmission, instead of just the default client is a plus.
3) Which has the easiest remote access over the web?
4) Best media streaming? Audio and photo streaming seem to be supported by both QNAP and Synology, but which one does video streaming better? Can either stream to an iPad or iPhone? Can they transcode a .avi to an iPad-compatible format on-the-fly, or at all? I know that will be the tallest order, and I've heard there are other ways to stream video (AirVideo) but I think that needs a computer running, not just a NAS.
Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
I'm looking at getting a NAS primarily for media storage and bittorrent downloading, as well as backing up my music and photo collection. I have a Mac laptop, not a desktop, so performance isn't really an issue on a daily basis, as I'll be limited by my wireless connection speed, not the speed of the NAS. Of course on the initial transfer I'll use a wired connection.
I bought a Buffalo Linkstation at Fry's just to get familiarized with a NAS, to see what I liked and what I didn't. (I'll be returning it shortly.) I was disappointed with the bittorrent functionality in particular. The Linkstation lacked RSS support, and you had to load each torrent one by one. I'd prefer a way to select and load multiple torrents, or even better, for the NAS to be able to monitor a folder and automatically load any new torrent in that folder to the queue.
In looking through this site and the forums, I've narrowed my choices down to QNAP TS110 or TS112 or Synology DS110j or DS211j. They're close in price, and in features, but I can't decide. The DS211j has two bays, which is nice from a future-proofing standpoint. I'm going to start off with a single 2 or 3 TB drive whichever NAS I get.
So here are my questions:
1) Is there any way to connect a NAS directly to a computer, without a router as intermediary? I don't have a gigabit router, just a 10/100, so any file transfer that has to go through my router would be limited to 100 mb/s. It's
2) Of the NAS units I'm considering, which has the best bittorrent support? In particular, I'm interested in RSS, scheduling, bandwidth control, remote (web or smartphone app) control of BT client, in-client torrent searching, and general ease of use. Being able to use different clients, like Transmission, instead of just the default client is a plus.
3) Which has the easiest remote access over the web?
4) Best media streaming? Audio and photo streaming seem to be supported by both QNAP and Synology, but which one does video streaming better? Can either stream to an iPad or iPhone? Can they transcode a .avi to an iPad-compatible format on-the-fly, or at all? I know that will be the tallest order, and I've heard there are other ways to stream video (AirVideo) but I think that needs a computer running, not just a NAS.
Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.