Ask Engadget: What's the best budget NAS?
By Darren Murph 
posted December 12th 2008 8:29AM
posted December 12th 2008 8:29AM
Yeah, we've seen a similar question before, but this one's looking specifically at NAS devices that won't force you to liquidate half your assets to afford. We'll let David take it from here, and once you're done reading / responding, send in a question of your own to ask at engadget dawt com: "I'm tempted to buy a NAS that centralizes all of my shared media, as well as act as a central backup. Redundancy is not a necessity as RAID0 will eventually fail and I'm not inclined to go RAID1 and waste the valuable disk storage space. I already have a few that I've been looking at, Buffalo's LinkStation and D-Link's DNS-323. What's people's opinion nowadays? Must-have features: UPnP support with transcoding (to media players, Xbox 360, PS3), torrent / NZB support with post processing, a nice GUI, a backup mechanism. Am I asking for too much?"
At first glance, we'd have to say "yeah, you just might be stretching it." But hey, maybe there's some perfect device hidden in the middle of nowhere that a kind reader will clue you in on. And if you're looking for dirt cheap, there's always the Addonics' USB-to-NAS adapter.
I'd recommend the NS4300N from Promise. It is $300 for a 4 bay NAS (found on Frys.com during a sale, happens every few months at this price).
Pros:
4 bay NAS with RAID 0,1, 5 or JBOD.
plugins allows for Bit Torrent, iTunes, and DLNA (for xbox, ps3 etc)
FTP server
Print server (usb port on back)
Excellent Tech support. I accidentally unmounted my HD's and they were able to remotely assist me in retrieving all my data
Size - very very small, you'll be hard pressed to build a NAS this size
Cons:
Current models fan is loud. They will be shipping a v2 soon (I think in late December or early January) with a quieter fan and variable speed/db
Transfer rate is NOT as fast as a DIY NAS
DNS-323 Hands down
Pros
- Does JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1
- Small, compact and little or no fan noise
- Open hacker community
I have hacked my DNS 323 to run every essential piece you'd want from a NAS plus more.
- Media STreamer
- SSH Server
- SQL Server
- WebServer (with PHP enabled)
- BitTorrent
- Samba Share
- and the list goes on....
The only down side is it has two drive bays. For me its not a problem, for some the story might be different.
Completely easy to setup!
ReadyNAS Duo would have been my first and only choice, unfortunately it's lack of raid support besides mirroring is why I don't get it. I'd like to be able to throw two 1TB drives in there for 2TB of storage. I don't need redundancy, that is the whole point of it being the backup device. If it could be configured, I'll buy it all over again. For people who like mirroring, then this device is cheap and fantastic.
Drobo is amazing, but fairly expensive to all heck.
I've been running the SimpleTech SimpleShare now for a few years and it is rock solid.
Plus's:
No fan..totally quiet.
Small
easy to understand web interface.
RAID 1, 0 and JBOD
Built in print server
two USB ports. You can plug in a printer and a second drive.
My SimpleShare is only a 250gb unit. But I have a 320 external in a RAID0 configuration and now have a 250gb redundant pool and a 70GB stand alone pool that are individually addressable.
Nice disk management and user management tools
Their support team is really good...first unit I got had problems...returned it and got one that has been working ever since.
Cheap! I paid about $120 for mine about 2 or so years ago
3 year warranty
Minus's
I don't think that the interface is hackable
it doesn't seem to have any multimedia services associated with it
The embedded linux OS is not upgradeable but there are firmware updates.
It's only 250gb (they have one bigger but it was to expensive for me at the time)
Ed
web/gadget guru
Build your own system if you don't require such a high end NAS
Motherboard and Processor extra ones or the one you're using now so you can upgrade your system
Centurion 690 $120.00 + addition 4-in-3 module $30.00 if you need 8 HDDs
Preferable a 650W PSU $100
WD Green Power HDD 4X$100.00
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.4660
I have the QNAP TS-409 NAS, and love it, works great, it has everything you want...the user interface isn't as "pretty" as I'd like, but its not complicated to understand. I looked into my decision, It took me several weks to decide what to go with..at one point, I even had my mind set on building a server...but I was getting over my head, and didn't want it to consume every free hour that I had, so I just bought something that all the hard work was done. It was a very easy installation.
Its got your upnp/ bit torrent/ & one touch back-up.
I only have One HDD in mine...I'm planning on picking up a few more when I get some more money. so I can have 4 1.5TB drives, in Raid5...which would total 4.5 TB's of space. :)
I've got a drobo (www.drobo.com) set up and connected to a computer for tons of storage and it works pretty well. I've had some trouble in the past, but their tech support's been great and everything should be fixed now.
The base unit basically just works like a big hard drive but there's a "drobo share" add-on you can get that runs apps and can turn it into a NAS with UPnP and other features.
I've had the DNS-323 at home for about a month now and it's awesome. The latest firmware update includes a bittorrent client so you can grab/share torrents without having your computer turned on. Plus it's gigabit, so if you're using a hard line connection it's blazing fast.
I don't have an x-box so I can't comment on that, but it comes with backup software (full, not trial) and I've been extremely happy with it.
I picked up an HP T5700 thin client off of ebay, and installed FreeNAS on it. Have a single usb drive plugged into it. I use it just to stream music to my Logitec Boombox. The thin client is completely silent (no moving parts or fans), and draws very little power.
I would love to find something that is expandable. I have lots of media files that are rather large, and I'm constantly adding more (raw photographs and shows archived off my Tivo).
I would love something like a drobo - but four slots doesn't cut it. The functionality of being able to plug in and mix and match drives at will *is* exactly what I'm looking for.
ZFS is promising, but you can't mix drive types (well, not efficiently) and it's not easy to expand. I don't want a ton of fragmented volumes out there. After dealing with iSCSI SANS at work, I love the concept of having a large pool of mailable storage out there. For similar reasons raid 5 is the suck - I don't want to rebuild an array to expand it.
Oh well - I guess I'll just start with FreeNAS and hope either ZFS matures or Drobo comes out with larger units! Or maybe I'll get lucky and score an Equallogic iSCSI SAN at some bankruptcy auction. Hey, I can dream....
Old PC FTW!! Put UnRAID on it, you're raring to go!
What are people's thoughts on HP's Media Vault Pro MV5150?
It's hard to go wrong with one when this deal is running, insane price after rebates and cashback:
http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=0&t=1049013
Personally, I have a WHS box running on an MSI Wind desktop barebones, 2gb ram, 2x 500GB HDs. Cost me about $350. I love it and the simplicity and ease of use of WHS. If I didn't have it, I'd jump all over the MediaVault deal above..hell, I may anyway.
Do any of these NAS units let you link 2 or 3 NAS units together in one share folder? I use a popcorn hour and hate to have to keep switching to multiple sources on the network.... Or is there a better way to do this?
A good alternative to a NAS these days might be a cheap netbook with an external 1TB hard drive. You get much more flexibility that way, and probably better performance too, although possibly for a higher cost.
FreeNas for me
I have a lot of Older computers laying around collecting dust. I used a older 500GB IDE hard drive I had. Then I added a 500 GB SATA drive. It was easy to set up the 2nd drive. I can also connect a USB drive to the box and add storage that way. That solution works well because I can connect my 1TB external drive and back up the NAS. My next step is to use a Optiplex 755 with a add on Intel dual Gb nic that will have ESX-i on it. One of the VM's will be Free Nas set to use 2 dedicated 1 TB HD's in the CD Drive bays. the 755 is also available with a external Esata port. I also have a Asus wireless router that has 2 USB ports on it. I used this for a while with a USB HD but it was flakey. I have not yet tried it with dd-wrt. Also I dont think I saw this mentioned but FreeNas is not linux it is based on FreeBSD.
The advantage of FreeNas or a linux box is you can turn it into much more then just a NAS with other functions and learn a ton about networking and Unix type OS's. I also like the ability to add support for different OS's. I can access my box from Windows, OSX, and Linux as well as have them automounted in all. I plan on trying to add a netboot server to the mix and use it to push Ghost images to machines and maybe some thin clients
You want way too much. So do yourself a favor and build one. Wait, don't stop reading yet, I can show you how to build a 4 drive NAS that's super tiny, as small as off the shelf crap; draws only ~65 watts; will do everything you want and then some, and is likely more attractive. Oh, and cheaper, and faster, and infinitely flexible.
Buy the case: Chenbro ES34069, xpcgear.com had the best price last I looked.
Motherboard: Via EPIA SN 18000G, itxdepot.com had the best price.
Memory: Your choice, you can only fit one stick in this case, I put a single 2GB Corsair DDR2 667mhz SDRAM 240-pin stick in.
Boot drive: Buy a compactflash card. I put in an 8GB. It was $28. (NewEgg).
Drives: 4 SATA drives, any size you like.
Total bill came to about $560 shipped, not including the 4 SATA drives. Install CentOS on it, or if you're not technically competent in a Linux shell, use FreeNAS.
This setup is extremely quiet; extremely power efficient; very small and if you know Linux, you can do whatever you like with it. Any RAID levels you desire (software RAID - it's plenty fast), any features you desire, etc. And hey - if you don't know Linux, there's nothing stopping you from installing Windows on it instead. The CPU has more than enough power. Build the array in disk management, share it and you're set.
Zyxel NSA-220, why?
Cheap
Linux based (hackable if thats your thing)
Quiet - nothing worse than a loud hum on a machine has to be on all the time.
Low power - cheaper to run
Takes 2 HDD in mirror jbod and seperates
all the features you would like - itunes/bittorrent/printer server/usb storage copying/sharing
mine was £130 without drives (i already has disks to use)
DNS 323.
I have 2 of them in service, one in 1TB (2x1TB RAID0) and 2TB(2x1TB JBOD).
Cheap, embeded print server, easy to set-up and run, Bittorrent client. I have no problems recommending the unit.
Only complaint is it is a little slow, but then I am used to my SAS NAS/SAN arrays at work, so things might be relative.
Its amazing how cheap these are getting, I still have one 1TB HP NAS in service, that cost 10x what these 2TB loaded DNS323 costs now.
I would still favour these over PC based NASs as they have smaller energy footprint. If you have several units and have them run 24/7, PC based units can get heavy on the leccy bill.
What would I change? Perhaps more drives than 2, but they already have the 343 for that albeit with a price premium.
Sorry, its 2x1TB RAID1. Brain fade. Hadn't had my coffee.
ReadyNAS NV+
Al the features you could ever want, and you can extend the filesystems on the fly. I just extended my four drives from 500 MB to 750 - it was easy as pie, and works like a charm. When my filesystem starts to get full and 1GB drives come down in price, I'll upgrade again. Increase my space and get a new warranty on the drives.
Lastly, even a NAS should be backed up and placed offsite, unless you don't value your data. In which case don't buy a NAS.
G
Great info guys, for someone considering his first NAS to serve all household needs, but I also want to be able to access this from the road. Are there any issues with internet-access security that aren't effectively dealt with in the various systems discussed?
I'm reading comments around building your own server versus a NAS box. At the this level, differences between these two will not be obvious because capacity capabilities of both are around the same. If you take this discussion up the scale to mid to large companies, NAS has a stronger argument as a solution.
Anyway, at this level it really comes down to "do you want to build something" or "do you want to unbox and get up and running"? I'll assume the latter based on the question concerning NAS. Of the consumer NAS offerings QNAP gives me a lot of functionality and performance out of the box. Many have mentioned it here already, but the ability to store and share media files with ease shouldn't be overlooked.
I have owned the Buffalo LinkStation Live for about 3 months now and it is complete junk. I have sent it back twice and each time they simply replaced the hard drive and sent it back to me. The issue was not with the hard drive but with the interface and I explained that to them on both occasions.
I finally had to give them my credit card number and do an advanced exchange to get a different drive. I have decided to put it on eBay and I bought the HP Media Vault which is AWESOME. Does RAID1 and comes with 1 500 GB drive (which you can rip out and replace with a 1TB job). It uses a TZO account to expose to the web and is much faster responding than the linkstation.
Which Linkstation Live did you have? The LS-CHL? I just picked up one of these - wasn't sure whether to open it up or try the Maxtor Central Axis server (got it at Staples for $219 on sale). Trying to host my iTunes library on the network - currently using an external 1TB drive plugged into the USB on an Apple Time Capsule.
Appreciate any insights you have on the LS-CHL or the Maxtor Central Axis.
I built my own using a Sempron CPU and motherboard, 3x500 GB hard drives in RAID5, and 1x80GB hard drive for Linux. Management is simple with Webmin. It's fast too. Data transfers over Gigabit Ethernet are steady at about 28MB/sec. RAID5 means I can just add more drives for more storage when I need it, and the array will rebuild itself.
hey people,
i have no idea how to post a question on engadget so can someone pls reply to me telling where to go to. to ask a question?
BTW, maybe you can give an input to the question: what are really good headphones (over-the-ear), noise cancelling, for not more than 60 dollars? o yea and they can't be wireless, i just left my bluetooth headphones because the sound was always getting cut off.
PS. I usually like brands like skullcandy and the sort, 'cause they go crazy loud, also i will only be using them for my Zune or computer.
I have 4 NAS's in my house:
1) Thecus N5200B
2) Promise SureStor NS4300N
3) Ubuntu Machine with 3ware controller
4) Roommates Ubuntu Machine with software RAID
I also recently started setting up an Openflier machine at work for iscsi/nfs for VMWare ESX.
While rolling your own is an excellent idea if you have spare parts laying around, I do not recommend it for home use because of loudness and maintenance required is much higher then a dedicated professionally built NAS. I am phasing out all my older tower machines for small/quiet/low power these days and the cost is about the same.
For specs, I prefer my Thecus hands down. It's the fastest RAID I've owned .(see smallnetbuilder NAS charts) I have a chroot'd Debian environment on it so the ability to install anything and the basic UI has most of the common functionality. (itunes/daap, media/dlna, ftp/nfs/smb, etc) but it's fairly primitive. If you're not technical, don't get this. Get the ReadyNAS. It's much easier to use and streamlined (and designed by people who speak english natively)
For cost, the promise is sure appealing. It's my newest and I only paid like $230 for the chassis. It's quite slow though, and I haven't done enough testing with x264 streaming with it yet.
Or rolling your own, if you have the parts.
All in all, for my purposes I would buy a small device like a Thecus or Promise any day of the week before lugging out another tower, and custom building it all. The price is too close to be worth the hassle to me.
This might seem a little off the wall, but look at picking up the popcorn hour. It supports Nzbget, utorrent, uPnp,Myihome, samba, ftp, etc.. also features a built in 1080p video decoder, HDMI, etc. all priced for just $250 including an 802.11N wireless adapter. I've got two of those for the bedroom and living room, and I keep all my HD content attached to the big screen, and standard def stuff in the bedroom. I can play all the content anywhere in the house, but I just l like to minimize traffic. Not to mention, they're customizable, and infinitely scalable. I've got 5.5tb online so far, and could double it tomorrow!
Need NFS as well as CIFS/SMB?
You could do worse than look at Iomega (ZIP disks anyone?) StorCenter Pro 150d
Link: http://www.iomega-europe.com/section?SID=8efb3c678cedbb51750c5e446959b294c1d:4735&secid=76619
I purchased this to enable Solaris/Linux/Windows users to all access the same NAS. Setup by default in RAID5 configuration, hotswappable, cheap, nice....
James
Look you cant beat turning your old PC into a NAS. But I think you should all take a look at the Freecom 1TB Network drive Pro.
The Freecom Network Drive Pro provides you with Network Attached Storage. This NAS uses the TCP/IP protocol, making it perfectly configurable for access within and outside of your network (via internet). It even features 2 USB Host ports, making it possible to attach extra storage capacity to your network, or even turn your USB printer into a network printer.
It has a number of value adds ontop of the being a repository for windows eg ftp server, dhcp server, print server, it also has a torrent client.
Take one of these beauties out of the box, plug it into your network and you are good to go. Connect to it via a standard browser, configure your directory structure, add a few users/groups with necessary read/write access and you are cooking. Connect to the unit how ever you like, via UNC, via FTP or Web browser.
Its specs talk for them selves:
Device Type: NAS server
Host Connectivity: Hi-Speed USB / Gigabit Ethernet
Total Storage Capacity: 500 GB, 1 TB
Width: 15 cm
Depth: 18 cm
Height: 5 cm
Weight: 1.4 kg
Enclosure Colour: Black, silver
Hard drive
Type: Standard - 3.5" x 1/3H
Capacity: 1 x 500 GB, 1 x 1 TB
Networking
Type: Network adapter - integrated
Data Link Protocol: Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet
Network / Transport Protocol: TCP / IP
Expansion / connectivity
Expansion Bays Total (Free): 1 ( 0 ) x internal - 3.5" x 1/3H
Interfaces:
1 x Ethernet 10Base-T/100Base-TX/1000Base-T - RJ-45
2 x Hi-Speed USB - 4 PIN USB Type A
Freecom also do a 2TB version and an uprated version with wireless.
Enjoy your Christmas.
Please god don't buy a LaCie NAS.
They are somewhere between shht and shjt.
Mine broke (inaccessable over the wlan) and it was then I discovered how bad their customer service was.
After about a month with no NAS they finally contacted me about it, eventually fixed it but....reformatted the drive in the meantime not giving me the opportunity to recover the data. Fuers!!
ReadyNAS will also support the NZB file download format as well, via NZBGet.
The plugin can be found here, for users of ReadyNAS 600, X6, NV/NV+, 1100: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=21791
Or here for users of ReadyNAS PRO: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=21793