4 bay nas advice

[chuckado]

I am looking into getting a 4 bay nas (diskless) with hot swappable drives. I have looked into drobo and they seem to be a good brand but the reviews on newegg seem to be iffy. I will be using it for backups of several machines and i will be putting all of my dvds on it and using is as a mapped drive on my pc to stream to my ps3. It must also have a gigabit nic. Hoping to get some ideas about different models. I would like to spend between 300 and 400 dollars, maybe a little more if it is a good deal.

Thanks for any help.

 

[stevech]

4-bay because?

 

[GregN]

I am looking into getting a 4 bay nas (diskless) with hot swappable drives. I have looked into drobo and they seem to be a good brand but the reviews on newegg seem to be iffy. I will be using it for backups of several machines and i will be putting all of my dvds on it and using is as a mapped drive on my pc to stream to my ps3. It must also have a gigabit nic. Hoping to get some ideas about different models. I would like to spend between 300 and 400 dollars, maybe a little more if it is a good deal.

Thanks for any help.

Check out the charts here, I think you'll find your answer there.

I have an older 5-drive Thecus N5200 for $90 for sale. Good Deal.

 

[travisco_nabisco]

I am currently researching 4 or 5 bay NASes for much the same purpose. From my looking around the best options for price are the Thecus 4100 Pro or the Synology DS411J.

The Synology is not hot-swap, but still a great option.

From what I have seen around SNB Thecus is often overlooked, though they do offer very good performance.

 

[chuckado]

I was thinking 4 bay because they seemed to be within my price range

 

[chuckado]

about the older thecus n5200, it only supports drives up to 750gb. I was hoping to put 2tb drives in it.

 

[GregN]

about the older thecus n5200, it only supports drives up to 750gb. I was hoping to put 2tb drives in it.

Supports up to 1TB drives, done it, no problem ( haven't tried 2TB drives, but I doubt you'd get full capacity ). But it is a significant limitation with 3TB drives starting to drop in price. Additionally mine is not the Roustor version ( only 2 1gig ports ).

Thecus has also to some degree missed the App train in comparison to the Synology and QNap.

$90 is a good deal, but if you are looking for high expandability, this ain't it.

 

[chuckado]

i was thinking about a drobo, do you guys have any problems with one of those?

 

[stevech]

I've read and heard people say Drobo is overpriced and too proprietary/closed.

 

[chuckado]

is that a bad thing? Is there something else I should be looking at?

 

[jprule]

As far as I know, Synology provides a much more user-friendly GUI than Thecus, if that concerns you. You can try live demo on their websites to see which design you prefer.