Looking for quiet, 4-bay NAS

[bwang]

Hello,

I'm looking some suggestions for the following:

- must have 4 bays
- must have Time Machine compatibility
- must be quiet for living room environment (I read that ReadyNAS are notoriously noisy)
- read/write speed is not critical (I will be using it mostly over wireless home network)
- priced around $400 is ideal, cheaper the better

Thanks

 

[ntm1275]

Covering all your criteria and at Newegg

Synology DS411j (1.2Ghz CPU, 128MB RAM) is $360 and has a noise level of 21.7dB with drives installed, non removable drive trays, single Gigabit connection, 2 USB ports

Qnap TS-410 (800Mhz CPU, 256MB RAM) is $414 and has a noise level of 35.1dB with drives installed, removable drive trays, 2 x Gigabit connection, 4 USB ports and 2 eSATA ports

Both are shipped with no hard drives

 

[kamina]

Are you sure Synology lists NAS noise levels with drive installed? I've understood they generally list them without any drives.

 

[ntm1275]

Are you sure Synology lists NAS noise levels with drive installed? I've understood they generally list them without any drives.

They used to quote dB level with fan only, but have recently updated all their datasheets to 'with drives'

When I first got my DS1010+, it was quoted as 23dB fans only, but the recent datasheet says 25.8dB with 5 x drives installed

Below are the quotes from the datasheet for the DS411j

• Noise Level(3): 21.7dB(A)

(3) Fully loaded with Seagate 1TB ST31000520AS hard drive(s) in operation; Two G.R.A.S. Type 40AE microphones, each set up at 1 meter away from the DiskStation front and rear; Background noise: 17.2 dB(A); Temperature: 23.6°C; Humidity: 58.2%.

The datasheet can be found here
http://download.synology.com/download/ds/DS411j/DataSheet/Synology_DS411j_Data_Sheet_enu.pdf

 

[dv8ed]

ntm1275: Great list! How would the Thecus N4100Pro compare to the models above?

It's around $350.

It has removable trays and it's pretty quiet just don't know how an AMD Geode compares to the above units.

 

[ntm1275]

From what I can find on Thecus' web site, it has am 800Mhz AMD Geode CPU and 256MB RAM, and is quoted by Thecus to have a transfer rate of 35MB/s (which I assume is the Read rate)
Its noise level is 23.9dB with drives installed

The Read rate on the Synology is quoted as 82MB/s, but I can't find a Qnap quoted figure, and none of them have been tested by SmallNetBuilder so it's a bit difficult to compare them

Perhaps if Tim Higgins reads this thread he might be able to shed a little bit more light on their performance based on his considerable knowledge

Something you may want to also consider is power consumption

Thecus
84watts full loading
64watts standby

Synology
42.9watts access
16watts hibernation

Qnap
20watts In operation
12watts sleep mode

They all use different wording to quote their power consumption figures, so I don't know whether these figures relate to one another

From what I can gather from each of the web sites, I think the Qnap and the Thecus may very well be older models, which although still available, may have been superseded by new models, where as the Synology is their current bottom of the range 4 bay NAS