Some questions before we place the order on a brand new NAS for the home

[drunknmunky]

Hey everyone! Seems to me like SNB is THE place on the web to ask questions about NAS devices, so here I am!

I'm looking to help my dad pick a NAS for our new house that we're moving into Wednesday.

I did my homework (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_nas&Itemid=190&chart=87) and our current pick is the QNAP TS-459 Pro+. We can't possibly go wrong with that thing. It's designed for business but we're putting it in our house, so I thought I'd run this past you NAS gurus to get some feedback.

We're planning on putting in 4 2TB drives to get 8TB of storage from the start. We already have tons of media just waiting to move into their new home on the NAS.. HD movies, TV shows, tons and tons of digital photos, lots of music, you name it.

The new house has what we've come to call a "media room" which will have a screen installed for projection with a full HD beamer. We'll need some sort of networked media player to let us enjoy all that content stored on the NAS. There will be a TV in the living room--same deal. More on that below.

I should mention that we have a very Mac-heavy household. Lots of iPhones, iPads, Macbooks. One Windows computer may join the party.

My dad and I compiled some specific questions that I'd like to share here. His needs are far more specific than mine. I'm just looking for blazing fast transfer performance, a PC-less FTP client on the NAS to do FTP downloads, good options for storage expansion, the ability to host a website and a great management UI for the NAS. (The TS-459 Pro+ certainly appears to fit this bill and THEN some).

On to the questions:

1. An absolute must is the support and smooth inter-operation with the following services: Sonos, Linn Akurate DS and Squeezebox.
2. For the sake of the question, let's assume we fill all the space available with 4 2TB drives. What are my options for expanding the storage? I could attach external drives to the USB ports, but the performance on those would be worse compared to the internal ones and adding them to a RAID configuration that way wouldn't be an option either, right?
3. How does a NAS work in relation to media center software? Since the files stored on the NAS are simply available to the network, I could technically have a Mac Mini, for example, running Boxee beside the TV and tell Boxee where the files are for indexing and I'm good to go... or would you still recommend a dedicated network attached media player device? If so.. why?
4. Streaming full HD (1080P) movies across the network to a TV or beamer is no problem these days, right? I'd hate to see movies stutter! (This may be a dumb question.. but we've never owned a NAS before so I want to learn as much as possible). We put Gigabit Ethernet in our house, by the way.. I guess that right there may answer the question with a clear NO. But I want to make sure.

And that's all I have so far! I realize this model may be overkill. But we love the feature-set and the apparently outstanding performance that I've read about in reviews. Opinions? Suggestions? I'm thankful for every comment.

Cheers from Switzerland!

PS
By the way.. how come Netgear doesn't seem represented anywhere in the NAS charts? I was under the impression, from my research, that their NASes are among the most popular on the market so it's odd they're nowhere to be found in the charts. Or did I miss something? Drobo isn't in there either..

 

[thiggins]

An absolute must is the support and smooth inter-operation with the following services: Sonos, Linn Akurate DS and Squeezebox.

QNAP's SqueezeCenter add-in works fine. Can't speak for the other media players.

For the sake of the question, let's assume we fill all the space available with 4 2TB drives. What are my options for expanding the storage? I could attach external drives to the USB ports, but the performance on those would be worse compared to the internal ones and adding them to a RAID configuration that way wouldn't be an option either, right?

I would add storage to eSATA before USB 2.0 for higher performance. External drives can't be added to internal RAID volumes. They will appear as separate volumes.
If you really fill 8 TB of storage, I'd get another NAS. I would not want to trust that much data to a single point of failure.

How does a NAS work in relation to media center software? Since the files stored on the NAS are simply available to the network, I could technically have a Mac Mini, for example, running Boxee beside the TV and tell Boxee where the files are for indexing and I'm good to go... or would you still recommend a dedicated network attached media player device? If so.. why?

Depends on the media player. If the player can browse network (SMB) shares, then you don't need anything special on the NAS. If the player must work with a DLNA / UPnP AV server, the QNAP has you covered there.
For audio streaming, you can stream and use the NAS at the same time. For HD video streaming, you may run into problems doing large file copies, downloads while trying to stream. It's not a CPU issue, it's having the drive heads doing a lot of seeking.
Again, this depends on the players and stream bandwidths. For Blu-ray 1080p rips with little to no compression and a player with a small, stupid buffer, the chances of problems go up. For the inverse, chance of problems go down.

Streaming full HD (1080P) movies across the network to a TV or beamer is no problem these days, right? I'd hate to see movies stutter! (This may be a dumb question.. but we've never owned a NAS before so I want to learn as much as possible). We put Gigabit Ethernet in our house, by the way.. I guess that right there may answer the question with a clear NO. But I want to make sure.

See above. 10/100 Ethernet handles 1080p just fine, by the way.

By the way.. how come Netgear doesn't seem represented anywhere in the NAS charts? I was under the impression, from my research, that their NASes are among the most popular on the market so it's odd they're nowhere to be found in the charts. Or did I miss something? Drobo isn't in there either..

NETGEAR is in the charts. Just not in every benchmark because of their "special" RAID system. They also aren't as aggressive about providing product for review as their competitors.

 

[drunknmunky]

Thanks a ton for taking the time to answer my questions, thiggins!

I found out that my dad heard about QNAP because Linn, the makers of the Akurate DS, recommend them, so support for the Linn Akurate DS is covered by that fact alone. And I'd be shocked if Sonos weren't supported. They don't require anything special of a NAS. Check!

Having said and answered all that, does anyone think the QNAP TS-459 Pro+ is overkill for our purposes? I feel like it may be. But then I think of the heavy FTP downloading that I will be doing on it in addition to 1080P streaming plus music streaming and I'm starting to think that we can easily use the performance this model has to offer, even at home.

Once again, thank you very much for your time and effort in answering my questions!