New NAS Recomendation ReadyNAS vs Synology

[nitro001]

Hello,
I know no one really mentions the ReadyNAS lineup here, but not sure why. I am coming from an old ReadyNAS NV+ Sparc system that I bought in 2009 to replace a broken 1st gen NV. It is running 4 1TB drives in XRaid and has been reliable for the past 7 years. However, it is starting to show its age. I can only get it to copy at roughly 5-8 Mbps sustained, every once in a while it bursts higher but only to 20 Mbps or so. Not even fast enough to stream a 720p movie to my old Boxee or NVIDIA Shield TV on Samba or NFS mount points...

So I am looking for a replacement. I like the ReadyNAS line, and at first I was looking for a system that could now do Plex streaming, no real trans-coding needed, but I have my Shield TV that can support that now if needed. I would also like to use on-line backup. The newer Amazon Cloud Drive seems like a good fit, low cost with a large amount of storage. But it seems the ReadyNAS only does 2 way sync and not 1 way backups. Also, although not critical, something that may do de-duplication. I think the BtrFS systems may do this in some form. Finally I do have a VMWare home system I use and while not important either, iSCSI would be nice for off-loading some of the drives to the NAS.

In the ReadyNAS line, I started looking at the 314 series, but it is about 3 years old now, then the newer 214 series this year but it is ARM Quad Core A15 @ 1.4 GHz vs Intel Atom Dual Core 2.1 GHz, both with 2GB RAM.

In the Synology line, I was looking at the DS415+ which is similar to ReadyNAS 314 with Intel Atom Quad Core 2.4 GHz and 2GB RAM. Or the newer DS916+ which is an Intel Pentium N3710 Quad Core 1.6 GHz bursting up to 2.6 GHz and 2GB RAM upgradeable to 8GB.

Has anyone used these systems or have a recommendation of one that can accomplish what I am looking for?

Thanks.

 

[mdgm]

I bought the same NAS back in 2009 (in fact, I bought two of them). The NV+ v1 uses the same Sparc CPU and RAM as the NV which was released back in February 2006. The NV+ is a great model but 10 years on from the NV's release it is showing its age. The NV+ was discontinued late 2011 (getting close to 5 years ago). Unsurprisingly even today's very low end devices are faster than it.

De-duplication whilst great in theory does require a lot of RAM. For using de-duplication a general recommendation would be to have at least 1GB of RAM for every 1TB of data and that's on top of any RAM for the OS, apps etc. So if de-duplication was offered for home NAS it would only really be suitable for small amounts of data and with small amounts of data running out of storage space wouldn't be a problem so deduplication wouldn't be very useful.

If you use iSCSI it would be strongly recommended to connect your PC running an iSCSI initiator to your network over ethernet. You should also backup the data on the LUN regularly just like you would backup any other data primarily stored on the NAS. No important data should be stored on just the one device. Offloading data to your NAS is great, but you still need to think about backup.

I would recommend using iSCSI only where all other options don't make sense. If you can use SMB/AFP/NFS file shares I would go with those rather than iSCSI, but that's my personal preference.

So you use VMWare ESXi at home and would like to use the NAS as a datastore? You can do that. How many VMs would you have running off the NAS? You should use backup software to continue to backup your VMs.

BTRFS is a Copy-On-Write (CoW) filesystem and can efficiently store a large number of snapshots. CoW and Snapshots should be used for use cases for which using them is appropriate and disabled for others.

If you don't need to transcode then any NAS that runs Plex should be fine. Personally I would avoid the very low end as you may still need to do some remuxing of audio (e.g. if audio is in the wrong format). Note also that transcoding is needed to burn in subtitles using Plex. All the options you mention should have the performance to stream video well. As for transcoding you should lookup the Plex NAS Comparison List: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201373803-NAS-Compatibility-List

It is important to note that all the different things you do with the NAS e.g. use it as a VM datastore, stream video using Plex, other file transfers etc. add up. It's important to choose what you get appropriately for what you will use. If you under spec you may need to make some compromises e.g. not run your VMs and stream video at the same time.

The new ReadyNAS devices have a new web admin UI. You will see some similarities with the UI for your old NAS, but the new UI has a newer, more modern look. You can see it for yourself at http://rndemo.netgear.com

If you go with the ReadyNAS you should use backup jobs to copy your data across to the new NAS: http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/d...raidiator-4-system-to-a-readynas-os-6-system?

I work for NETGEAR, but the opinions above are my own.

 

[KenZ71]

My vote is NAS4Free