5 Bay NAS for Multimedia and General Storage ?

[herculepirate]

Gents,

I am looking forward to get a 5 bay NAS.
I want to have my Music (flac's) and Movies and General documents.

I am not sure if I should plunge into WHS since I hear that they could at any time install anti piracy into their software which can delete illegal contents. I have already had this experience with Windows Media Player.

My requirements are :
1. 5 bay or more.
2. DONT care about Hot Swap
3. It should be User Friendly and not a Geeky instrument...
4. Transfer rates should be good.....Since I plan to play a lot of HiDef content over the network...
I was looking into the DROBO S/FS... Do you recommend this product ? Transfer Rates ? Ease of Use ?
I can combine the S version with a USB to Ethernet device to make a NAS...
Fill it ...Shut It...Forget It ...option.
5. Should be able to use add various software on it....May be some Servers and UPNP servers..>Some products come with standard applications...but would appreciate the flexibility

Your Kind advise would be valuable.

Regards

HP

 

[Bones]

5 bay nas

I purchased a Drobo fs for my mac pro to put my itunes library on it. It worked fine and very easy to setup. What i didn't like was the fan was loud and did not seem to ever slow down. Drobo sent me a second one to try and it was the same, just loud. Drobo gave me a free upgrade to the drobo s which is 100 dollars more than the fs. It is directly attached to my mac pro and has my itunes library on it, it is connected by esata and other than it did not mount a couple of times when i started my mac all is working great. I think it was because the drobo needed to finish booting before i entered my passwork and hit the enter key.

 

[thiggins]

Your requirements are very simple. Any NAS with the # of bays you want should work.

Drobo is relatively new to networked storage and doesn't bring anything special to the party vs. QNAP, Synology, Buffalo, NETGEAR, etc.

 

[teknojnky]

a friend at work had a drobo, he told me it was slow and then one day it crashed and lost all his stuff.

 

[pedro77]

Hi HP. I've been going through a similar process. I was originally keen on the Drobo FS, which is more than enough for HD streaming, but have decided against it. For the same money you can get a Synology 1010+ (5 bay) or for a bit more a QNAP 659 Pro+ (6 bay). The reviews I've read show the Drobo transfer speeds are a lot slower than the other two and there's less expandability in terms of adding an external drive and the extra server apps your can get.

I initially thought that the idea of adding spare drives to the Drobo with redundancy made it appealing but if you're going to spend this much money on a device, then skimping on adding small older drives is a waste when it actually cuts into your overall capacity. The Synology does offer a similar system called SHR.

I also looked at WHS and was interested in the HP EX490 (3 extra bays) but it's transfer speeds were also less than the other NAS devices (ie ~20mb/s vs ~90mb/s). Although you can install some 3rd party apps like a proper iTunes client (and use an iPhone Remote app to control music) or Dropbox, these windows sever apps aren't always supported or easily upgradable. I've decided to use an old laptop to run these.

The other thing you have to consider is what hard drives you'll use. Apparently some of the new drives such as WD and Samsung use 4K sectors which aren't always as efficient with NAS's (eg with RAID 5) unless they are properly formatted and aligned. I'm going to get 4 of the 2TB Hitachi 7K2000 drives because they're proven and tested. The new Samsung F4EG drive is appealing though because it has less platters (3 vs 5) and possibly less likely to fail but I don't want to stuff around to make sure it's aligned and compatible.

I've finally decided to get the QNAP 659 Pro+ because of the better build quality and the extra bay and the new version also has a faster processor (1.8 vs 1.6GHz). Synology has an extra device to add the the 1010+ called DX510 which effectively turns it into a 10 bay NAS but I figure that by the time I would even fill 5 bays the DX510 won't be available and there will probably be better storage technology anyway.

Hope this helps. Let us know what you decide to get.

Cheers
Pete