Sub $300 NAS for home use

[BeefSupreme]

Hi all, I'm new to the forums, but I've done quite a bit of research and I have some pretty specific questions and I'd appreciate all your feedback.

I'm looking for a NAS mainly to use for (1) central back-up of my PCs, photos, mp3s, other documents, and (2) serving up my mp3s to my PCs running iTunes. I plan to use RAID-1 for safety over performance. So nothing too fancy, but I obviously want the best price/performance ratio and I want to spend under $300.

SO.. I've identified two main contenders in this price range:
(1) Iomega ix2-dl (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/...ga-storcenter-ix2-dl-network-storage-reviewed)
(2) Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/...to-the-charts-buffalo-linkstation-pro-duo-wvl)

Right now I can get either of these with 2x1TB drives from Amazon for about $250, so price difference is not an issue right now.

Here's my question (finally):
Which has better performance for my uses in a RAID-1??

I'm a little confused by the benchmarks.
I read the benchmarking and testbed information through pretty carefully, but there seems to be some weird anomalies here.

FIRST question: the ix2: It has BETTER performance (74.4) in the [NASPT] RAID 1 File Copy from NAS than it does for RAID 1 File Copy Read Performance (58.6). Weird right? Shouldn't copying large files be faster?

SECOND question: The Linkstation has substantially better performance than the ix2 in Robocopy RAID-1 File Copy.
So I was leaning toward the Linkstation until I dug deeper in the NAS charts.
BUT, the Linkstation has abysmal [NASPT] read/write performance. Especially in [NASPT] write performance and the NASPT directory tests.
So.. again.. Weird right?

I'm concerned that the Linkstation is going to be very slow for copying over mp3s a few albums at a time, which is very common task for me. So now I'm leaning towards the ix2.

My understanding is that copying over a few albums worth of MP3s at a time is going to be pretty similar to [NASPT] write performance, correct?
I understand that the Robocopy benchmark uses a DVD copy as a test, so its much bigger files than a few hundred megs of MP3s.
The individual product reviews don't mention the NASPT performance difference, or the Linkstation's terrible NASPT RAID 1 performance, at all.

Thanks in advance for helpful insight.

Suggestions for other options under $300 with drives are also welcome. Also looking at Zyxel NSA320 and NSA325, but having trouble finding info on them.

 

[thiggins]

First, thanks for doing your homework. It's much appreciated.

Two other products you may want to consider are the D-Link DNS-325 or DNS-320 and WD MyBook Live Duo.

These and the other products you are considering are all based on ARM processors and roughly in the same performance class.

The Windows Filecopy test is a folder of a ripped DVD. It has five 1 GB files, one 262 MB file and the remaining 32 files range from 77 MB to 10 KB. The NASPT filecopy test uses one 1.15 GB windows backup file. So I think the Windows filecopy is going to more accurately reflect your batched MP3 backups.

Every NAS is significantly slower on the NASPT Directory copy tests. The small file sizes raise network overhead and there is also more head seeking.

Remember that RAID is NOT backup. RAID won't save you if the controller or power supply dies at the wrong time and corrupts your volume. It also won't save you if the NAS suffers physical damage or is stolen.

I saw your other post on the ZyXEL NASes and am following up. But there won't be any review in time for your decision.

 

[BeefSupreme]

Thanks for the response!

Remember that RAID is NOT backup. RAID won't save you if the controller or power supply dies at the wrong time and corrupts your volume. It also won't save you if the NAS suffers physical damage or is stolen.

Interesting. So then really the only purpose for RAID-1 is to guard against individual hard drive failure?
Maybe I should just get a single-bay NAS and backup to an external USB drive..

 

[thiggins]

So then really the only purpose for RAID-1 is to guard against individual hard drive failure?

RAID's primary purpose is to allow creation of larger logical volumes out of multiple smaller physical drives. The redundancy built into RAID was necessary to protect against data loss when drives eventually failed.

With today's drive capacities up to 4 TB, many consumers can avoid RAID altogether.

Backup to an attached drive or NAS-to-NAS backup is a good alternative to RAID. If you go with attached backup, consider two drives to alternate backups and store one is a safe, preferably offsite, location.

And don't forget to put any NAS on a UPS!