Consideration between QNAP TS-412 vs. ReadyNAS Ultra4

[wlai]

Hi everyone:

I'm interested in a pretty typical home NAS situation, mostly for photos and media files. Pretty much an all Mac home, so TimeMachine, iTunes, DLNA streaming to PS3, Torrenting are the key features. Absolute screaming performance isn't my key consideration, but stability, reliability, and ease of operations (including RAID expansion and repair) are.

I know the pricing between these two models are pretty far apart ($469 vs. $599), but I read about the Corndog's sticky on Netgear in the forum and think *if* rock solid reliability and support is a real differentiator, I'm willing to pay for premium.

However, I'm wondering if the lack of eSATA is a real drawback. Also, I'm not clear about the performance difference between a (1.2GHz Kirkwood, 1G RAM) vs (1.66GHz Atom, 256K RAM)

Do you have any advice for me?

Also, I'm wondering if either supports the ability to mirror my files to an offsite/online backup solution, including just mirroring to Amazon S3 volume. Seems to me that's going to be the next big thing for someone worrying about data security. Yes, it's slow, but if it's a secondary backup I'm less concerned.

 

[thiggins]

Lack of eSATA is only a negative if you're doing backups to attached drives. eSATA will be much faster.

In general Atom-based NASes will be faster than Marvell.

Both support backup to cloud services. QNAP supports S3, I think NETGEAR does too via an add-in.

 

[claykin]

Lack of eSATA is only a negative if you're doing backups to attached drives. eSATA will be much faster.

In general Atom-based NASes will be faster than Marvell.

Both support backup to cloud services. QNAP supports S3, I think NETGEAR does too via an add-in.

+1 on the eSata comment.

Readynas does not (yet) support S3. Only Vault (elephantdrive). I've seen a couple threads on the Readynas.com forums where people have managed to load Crashplan on their NAS. Its a bit complicated unless you understand Linux commands and are comfortable with root SSH access into the box.

Hopefully S3 or other cloud options are coming soon to the Readynas lineup.

 

[wlai]

Lack of eSATA is only a negative if you're doing backups to attached drives. eSATA will be much faster.

Thanks. Just want to make sure I understand the scenario, does the above mean that if I backup directly from Mac/PC to an eSATA drive, and then connect the eSATA drive to copy over to the NAS RAID array?

Since Macs don't generally support eSATA anyway, I guess I don't see it as a scenario that applies to me.

I had thought that eSATA would allow me to go beyond the 4 bays to 5+ drives. That would seem like a good expansion capability to me.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks. Just want to make sure I understand the scenario, does the above mean that if I backup directly from Mac/PC to an eSATA drive, and then connect the eSATA drive to copy over to the NAS RAID array?

No. eSATA drive attaches to the NAS to back up internal volumes

I had thought that eSATA would allow me to go beyond the 4 bays to 5+ drives. That would seem like a good expansion capability to me.

In general, external drives aren't available to be part of internal volumes. I think Thecus allows this, but I could be wrong.

 

[ntepperman]

Don't know if it matters to you or not (it mattered to me), but the QNAP has a 1 year warranty, vs. a longer warranty for the ReadyNAS.