New NAS on the block

Offloading HDDs and other functions to remote NAS or servers is increasingly popular
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Pétur
Posts: 59
Joined: Thu Feb 17, 2005 3:09 pm
Location: Gent, Belgium

New NAS on the block

Post by Pétur » Wed Jun 18, 2014 12:52 pm

(full disclosure: I run the Belgian/Dutch QNAP community forums which are independent user forums; I'm also a beta tester; I am, however, not employed by QNAP at all and you can find plenty of negative talks by me on their forums as I try to stay balanced)

Since the news is somewhat out due to the Computex announcement, I thought it might be interesting to mention a new QNAP NAS model. No, I'm not talking about the HS- and IS- fanless models, I'm talking about the TS-x51 range.

Ever since the dreaded TS-209 with its noisy fan (for me), QNAP has been getting a bit better in the noise department, but with the TS-x69 range this stopped (it was actually worse). Now, however, I think we have a new winner.

I've had a TS-451 on beta test for a while now, and I can easily say it is the most quiet NAS I have had here (I haven't had any fanless models). This article has more tech specs: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/2 ... 6H3QaYjtFY

Basically, it runs a low power dual-core Celeron 2.4GHz with low voltage DDR3 ram, and (except for the 2 bay model) has a nice big slow-turning fan at the back. I'm impressed with it. My other NASses are hidden away, this one is currently on test in my living room.

The price will probably be premium, this is QNAP after all, but it is targeted at home, and it's by far the fastest home/homeoffice NAS I have seen (currently stuffed 8GB ram in it and running debian in a VM).

edit: found a better link with more info:
http://files.qnap.com/news/pressresourc ... 608-RS.pdf

fjf
Posts: 192
Joined: Wed Apr 06, 2005 9:44 am
Location: Europe

Re: New NAS on the block

Post by fjf » Fri Aug 08, 2014 10:25 am

This one looks tempting, even though its near 700 euro. Its has no power supply inside the box (uses a power brick) and therefore has no little fan inside. The multimedia and download software is not like synology's, but the worst thing is that I was planning on installing two of the new WD 6TB REDs in RAID, and expand later as needed, but the QNAP web says "QNAP NAS supports a disk volume of larger than 16TB. To use these models with QNAP NAS, please upgrade the NAS firmware to v3.4.0 or later. A disk volume of less than 16TB of storage can only be expanded to maximum 16TB by online RAID capacity expansion or adding hard drives. Online RAID capacity expansion and adding hard drives are not supported for a disk volume of over 16TB", which I guess means that If I try expanding later it will stop at 16TB. The multimedia software may not be the main interest of a NAS company, but com'on, storage?.

Pétur
Posts: 59
Joined: Thu Feb 17, 2005 3:09 pm
Location: Gent, Belgium

Re: New NAS on the block

Post by Pétur » Sat Oct 25, 2014 11:14 am

Sorry for not spotting your reply sooner.

The 16TB is a system limit and there are ways to overcome:
- recreate the volume when the new config gets > 16TB (yes, very annoying to backup and restore because of this)
- just make a new RAID set with the new drives, add it to the storage pool, and expand the logical volume with it.

I'm quite a fan of their new storage manager, it allows for creating multiple smaller RAID sets, and combining the in one big volume. As you might be aware, RAID5 (and even 6) become troublesome with large drives due to long rebuild times and this higher risk on a second or third disk failure during rebuild (don't ask, I've been there!)

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