N5500, DS411+ or TS43

[narb77]

Hi, im currently in the process of trying to decide on my first NAS unit. I currently have 4TB worth of movies and Music, (ATM) on external hard drives. I stream these to othere computers on a network and play in Windows Media Center and Itunes. Also play them through a PS3 occasionaly.
I have read quite a few reviews and have short listed a few possibilities.

Thecus N5500, Seems to have a lot of features, USB and esata ports. Also having 5 bay for hard drives so i can run RAID 5 with still plenty of storage space.

Synology DS411+, ment to be easier to use and set up but with 1 Less HDD Bay.

Q Nap Ts439 Pro, Has had great reviews from what i have seen. Again 1 less Hdd Bay.

Price does matter a bit, so the Thecus N5500 seems to be the best value for money. Reviews about the software and initial setup are a little negative. But these are a year old. So perhaps some updates have fixed some of these problems.

 

[stevech]

Not saying this forum is 100% comprehensive, but for small home entertainment and photo sharing, etc., there seems to be mostly focus on Synology and QNAP, perhaps because of their software feature set. I suppose many folks assume that all the NASes based on Linux have good RAID or mirroring or volume management, etc. So the discriminators are robustness of the company and frequent upgrades to a comprehensive suite of software capabilities and ease of use.

So it would be good to kick up the discussion on Thecus' products?

But mass market retail is dominated by the likes of D-Link, Netgear and the like, in entertainment NASes. Synology, QNAP and these perhaps focus mostly on SOHO and Small Biz offices, and catch some of the home market on the low end, whereas D-Link/Netgear are the inverse, it seems.

 

[narb77]

Thanks for the reply. Really wish there were more reviews on the thecus software.

Another quick quistion, is it overkill that i am looking at these NAS. Or would i be just fine with the likes of a Synology DS411j.
I was looking at units with 1G or ram due to wanting to stream HD and maybe BlueRay movies to 2 or 3 Computers at once.

Would i require the extra power to meet these needs.

 

[stevech]

I'm having the same thoughts --- I don't need a big-ole 4 drive NAS.
I have an old (Airlink 1010 one-drive NAS (SATA) that does folder sharing for Windows and Linux, and has a media server bare bones that MS Media Player can see and use. That cost $50 plus drive. Pretty spartan.

So I'm leaning towards using an external NTFS formatted (for files larger than a FAT32 drive can accept) backup, rather than RAID1. I have RAID1 in my always-on PC running SageTV and a web server/home automation (HomeSeer). Uses XP. Runs 24/7 for years. Reboot once a month or so. So really, a Synology or like NAS gets me the fancy server software. But it's marginal.

I also built an Intel Atom dual core mini-ITX box. Cost about $125 less cost of MS Windows. Have run Ubuntu on it. I think this is the same CPU that the latest NASes use. What this lacks is the fancy media server software. I'll bet that most of that software we see on Synology/QNAP is freeware for Linux.

So it's about the media server features rather than storage or backup, for me.

 

[thiggins]

We would review more Thecus NASes if they would provide them. Seems companies are tightening review product budgets lately since Synology, QNAP, Thecus and NETGEAR are all slow to provide review product. So it's not a plot against Thecus.

Thecus has always been a performance leader, but has lagged on software and service. The new admin GUI has helped. But Thecus is still the weakest of the aforementioned group for service and firmware update frequency.

Any current NAS will stream 1080p HD just fine. A lot of RAM doesn't help streaming performance. It just helps write performance for small files (more cache space).

 

[stevech]

It would be great if there was a simplified feature- and a performance-comparison chart, helping us know if among the SOHO/SMB products, the less-advertised units like QNAP, Synology, Thecus are indeed more innovative/attractive vs. heavily marketed units from Netgear, D-Link, LG, Western Digital (relabeled from ?), IOmega, et al. The one such comparison I've seen (URL linked from here) is out of date by 18 months or so.

Do people want these NASes to transcode on the fly?

 

[teknojnky]

Do people want these NASes to transcode on the fly?

this is a rare feature to find, especially on the low end.

readynas has an ORB addon, but it seems pretty bleh and requires special clients.

some devices may have 3rd party addons which can do transcoding on the fly, but I have not seen anything that can universally transcode anything for any type of client, usually its only transcode to a specific kind of client.

 

[narb77]

Thanks for the replys.
I think I may go with the Thecus N5500 as I can get it for a really good price, and the store assures me of support if things should get confusing.

Thiggins, is the new GUI you spoke of, the Version 5 update on the Thecus website.

Also wondering if anyone has had any experience with On Line RAID Migration and Expansion. I want to run in RAID 5, So if i could start with 3 HDD's and add more when i needed would be great. But if it would create more problems, I would just fill with drives from the get go.

 

[stevech]

On transcoding ... how then does one of these home NASes serve videos out to mobile devices that needs small-screen 3GPP formats whereas the source is likely mpeg or mov or some such, and far too large to transport to a mobile device (smart phone).

 

[thiggins]

QNAP's DLNA server (Twonky) transcodes AVI, M4V, MPG/MPEG, RM/RMVB, WMV.

Serving to mobile devices tends to require special apps or plugins like ORB.

We reviewed two NETGEAR ReadyNAS streaming options, Skifta and ORB Live over on SmallCloudBuilder.