Rollins said:Could you just put together a cheap-o PC for ~$200 and throw in a bunch of $60 1TB drives?

Of course you can, and most of us who use NAS devices at home have gone that route before. Just don't use Windows for software RAID-5. Performance is atrocious, I got < 10MB/sec. on large file transfers over gigabit ethernet with jumbo frames. FreeNAS and OpenFiler are quite good though, software RAID is decent in these distros.

One other thing, will your cheap-o PC have hot swappable drive bays? Mine doesn't because I didn't want to pay an extra $150 for one of those hot swap SATA drive bay things. If I have a drive failure, I'll need to identify the failed disk by serial #, then open the case and make sure to replace the correct drive. Otherwise the RAID-5 array will be toast (due to two "missing" drives).

I ponied up years ago for the ReadyNAS NV+ before Netgear bought out Infrant. It's a very small profile box, smaller than a Shuttle PC. It has hot swappable drives with online capacity expansion, a good web GUI, support for iTunes streaming and AFP protocol for my Macs, and their support forum is excellent. $549 is less than I paid years ago for my bare enclosure, and this one comes with a pair of drives. A good deal in my opinion, but obviously not for everyone.

Any advantage to this over the the Thecus N4100Pro? Seems from a quick look like the Thecus box is cheaper, faster, quieter, and has more features. IMHO, you also really need 4 drives to really take advantage of these RAID 5 capable boxes.

Thecus n4100Pro $370.66 (after CB eBay/Buy.com)
2x 1TB drives ~ $140-160

Ttl ~ $511-531 no tax, no rabate, after CB

Definitely looks like a good deal. I remember a time when I was hot for this device as some fellow audio/video enthusiasts on various boards I frequented were talking this thing up, big time. I waited for prices to drop for 2-3 years, but they never did drop at all. Then I lost interest.

Just remember, this device is not really a true backup method. You need to back up this RAID-5 device as well. Which is partly why I lost interest, heeding the subsequent advice of some much more experienced on these matters than myself (i.e., the gist of their opinions is that RAID 5 is more suited to businesses with super critical redundancy and "get back up to speed quickly because a money is a wastin'" needs). It's both overkill and underkill (from a backup standpoint) to most home users who want to stream video and audio content, which is all I want to do.

Not sure how I want to proceed yet, but probably RAID 1 or 2, then a couple backups of that, rotating those on/off the premises in case of fire/theft.

navelgaze said:Definitely looks like a good deal. I remember a time when I was hot for this device as some fellow audio/video enthusiasts on various boards I frequented were talking this thing up, big time. I waited for prices to drop for 2-3 years, but they never did drop at all. Then I lost interest.

Just remember, this device is not really a true backup method. You need to back up this RAID-5 device as well. Which is partly why I lost interest, heeding the subsequent advice of some much more experienced on these matters than myself (i.e., the gist of their opinions is that RAID 5 is more suited to businesses with super critical redundancy and "get back up to speed quickly because a money is a wastin'" needs). It's both overkill and underkill (from a backup standpoint) to most home users who want to stream video and audio content, which is all I want to do.

Not sure how I want to proceed yet, but probably RAID 1 or 2, then a couple backups of that, rotating those on/off the premises in case of fire/theft.

I get what you are saying, but still think for many users its still a good compromise IMHO. I use mine primarily for two classes of data, neither of which really need backing up. First I use it for backups of my laptop. This doesn't really need to be backed up as its already a backup for the laptop drive. The chances of both my laptop and 2 disks on the RAID dying all at the same time is very slight (barring a fire or something). Second, I use it for a huge volume of media files. While it would be great to have a backup of those, backing up 4TB of data is not really practical. RAID 5 provides a reasonable amount of protection against me having to re-rip 500 or so DVDs. To me thats worth the loss of disk space, but anything really beyond that is going to be more hastle/cost than its worth. If worst comes to worst, I'll just re-rip them. It is probably a smart idea to have at least a few gigs of offsite storage, for important documents, family pictures, etc. Web disks are a great solution for this sort of thing.

the chances of simultaneous dual disk failure are extremely high if you are using sata drives lol.

nas really sucks. most people just don't get that 128MB/s is the max you'll get out of a single (non mpio) gigabit link which is about as fast as 1 7200rpm drive.

when netxen controllers (10gbe) become more reasonable fcoe/iscsi/nas will definitely become alot more popular. right now its such a pain to pull 400MB/s out of nas/iscsi/etc with gig-e

Anybody care to elaborate on why I get red for trying to save people money by suggesting an equivalent if not better product thats cheaper? Something I don't know about the Thecus box?

Kingofthenet said:miscrms said:Anybody care to elaborate on why I get red for trying to save people money by suggesting an equivalent if not better product thats cheaper? Something I don't know about the Thecus box?

Well this box is made for simpletons, so you cant cut yourself on the inside sharp edges.

As is the Thecus NAS. It's not like I'm trying to compare a ready built NAS to building a linux box, like the guy above.

I have an NV+ and the NVX is much faster (from review benchmarks, which you have to be careful about, because early on, Netgear imroved performance majorly on the NVX with a firmware update AFTER these things had already been reviewed. I've seen a lot of sites mention this in their reviews). I have been trying to find old NV+ benchmarks, but they're rare (they were once very prevalent). Methinks Netgear is wielding their influence to convince review sites to stop hosting old NV+ reviews in order to push their new lineup.

The NV+ (and the Duo, X6, 1000, and 600) is based on a proprietary Infrant processor with a Sparc core. Netgear ditched that in the new gen (NVX, Pro, 1100, 2100) and is just using Intel cores (I'm not sure if they're all x86 cores though). This is a smart idea , but now the devices cost a lot more.

All things considered, the new lineup of ReadyNAS devices are FAST but EXPENSIVE (the Pro can damn near saturate a single GigE port getting like over 100MB/s read in most benchmarks).

As a ReadyNAS owner, I cannot speak from experience for Thecus devices, but everyone rags on their support. ReadyNAS firmwares have been stable and pretty feature rich. They have a good community, but you still need to do some work to figure out how to configure the damn thing as the firmware http interface is clearly designed by engineers lol.

I would not buy a Thecus, but I did my research a while back. I think the NV+ still offers a nice price to performace ratio, and unless you'd prefer to pay more and spend more time to build and configure your own larger uglier box (obviously with better performance and more control however), I think this is a good buy. The only company I'd consider over a ReadyNAS device is QNAP, and they weren't very much on the scene when I bought my NV+.

The NV+ isn't that fast, but it isn't that expensive either. I would heavily consider this (I did lol). Netgear is actually quite honest about performance on this device here: http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=193#Performance

jpopfan said:Rollins said:Could you just put together a cheap-o PC for ~$200 and throw in a bunch of $60 1TB drives?

Of course you can, and most of us who use NAS devices at home have gone that route before. Just don't use Windows for software RAID-5. Performance is atrocious, I got < 10MB/sec. on large file transfers over gigabit ethernet with jumbo frames. FreeNAS and OpenFiler are quite good though, software RAID is decent in these distros.

One other thing, will your cheap-o PC have hot swappable drive bays? Mine doesn't because I didn't want to pay an extra $150 for one of those hot swap SATA drive bay things. If I have a drive failure, I'll need to identify the failed disk by serial #, then open the case and make sure to replace the correct drive. Otherwise the RAID-5 array will be toast (due to two "missing" drives).

I ponied up years ago for the ReadyNAS NV+ before Netgear bought out Infrant. It's a very small profile box, smaller than a Shuttle PC. It has hot swappable drives with online capacity expansion, a good web GUI, support for iTunes streaming and AFP protocol for my Macs, and their support forum is excellent. $549 is less than I paid years ago for my bare enclosure, and this one comes with a pair of drives. A good deal in my opinion, but obviously not for everyone.

FW should just add a script to post this interaction ("just use a PC" / specialized devices are easier and save power) automatically for any post about a NAS device.