That will be the first piece of hardware I'm gonna purchase after a new gfx card. Absolutely convincing. Superfast, external RAID, no dependencies on the hardware in your PC, very good price - a must have for me.

Save yourself £140 and get the IcyBox NAS4220. Bit should really get one from Scan and do a review as i think it would compare extremely well to the Qnap and it costs under £100.

"so data redundancy can only be achieved with RAID 1 but then you lose half your total capacity and achieve no extra performance.". Doesn't RAID1 give some performance advantages in reads?
Not that it matters with the low transfer rates from the appliance anyway... :D

you guys gunna do the drobo that you mentioned in the first article on these qnap alternative as i checked out their site and the product looks easier to use, and nicer imo

ooo, shiney, but how does this or any other NAS stack upto the HP Media Smart Servers?

Sam

Originally Posted by airchie
"so data redundancy can only be achieved with RAID 1 but then you lose half your total capacity and achieve no extra performance.". Doesn't RAID1 give some performance advantages in reads?

Yes - good RAID1 implementations will read from whichever drive can provide the data first, either because the drive is not busy servicing other I/O requests or because its read head is closer to the requested data at the time. Not much of a performance boost, but some.

I thought good ones could do concurrent reads too?
So split read requests between the drives.
Almost like having your main memory in dual-channel config?

Hmmm, rather overpriced NAS especially for 2 drives. The Promise Technologies SmartStor NS4300N is a better deal since they can be found for a bit more money than the QNAP II but offer better performance (and reliability over the Drobo).

Unless you're a digital hoarder who has more porn media than you can shake a DVD collection at, two terabytes (or more in the future) is plenty for most people as a bit of communal storage.

Seeing as I have 4 TB of HD space right now, I'm not sure If I should feel complimented or Insulted....

Bit tech might also want to consider the Synology line of NASes. Also very feature rich in what they provide through software, and like the Qnaps - available in a variety of disk sized models. I've got an older one-disk "Diskstation 106j" and its superb. Their software updates have applied to the full line of models, so the even the cheapest models got the great new Ajax interface a while back. i was VERY happy.

Can you plug a USB wifi dongle into the back to allow it to connect wirelessly?

Originally Posted by Wolfe
Seeing as I have 4 TB of HD space right now, I'm not sure If I should feel complimented or Insulted....

Seriously, what do you hoard?



I can't fill a terabyte of stuff I want to watch and listen to, everything else gets deleted or written to disk.

Cupboard - I don't think so, there's no specific space for it unlike the Thecus N2100 which does support it.