I have chosen another IT focused review this week. As we all know having your own network at home with access to your media files and photos is the new big thing. Probably the more important aspect to having a NAS is to be able to back up your data. I don't know how many times I have heard someone say in anguish "I have lost all my photos because my hard drive crashed". You then ask (fully knowing what the reply will be) "was it backed up? the reply comes back in a small voice "no, can you help me?" You then set about the task of trying to recover their life from the time that they bought their first digital camera. Not always successful. I think that these situations are often referred to as a "good learning experience". (If only we could learn from the experiences of others!)
The latest TVs come with wireless connection and the ability to stream files from your network. There are a number of NAS boxes with various degrees of services on the market. For my money, which is obviously why I bought it, the QNAP series of all-in-one boxes is probably the most versatile available. The Synology boxes do come pretty close in this respect. We have used one of the upmarket Synology units at work and the performance is surprisingly good for a cheap piece of rack mount storage. Back to the QNAP. This is a four disk unit that can be configured with either RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 or 10. plus just as separate disks.
This is the second QNAP box i have purchased. The first one was a one of the original TS109 models which I got second hand.. and is still going. It must be about 5 years old now. I think that they have stopped updating the firmware on this one due to its age though.
Th TS-412 is capable of running the latest firmware from QNAP. Mine is currently on the new version, V3.6. Setup was easy with one minor problem. After you format the drive it immediately gives you the option of install the firmware, don't do it, wait a couple of hours otherwise the install fails. I tried to install the firmware a couple of times but it refused to cooperate. It was getting late so I formatted it one more time and went to bed and let it continue overnight. I tried again in the morning before going to work and it went straight on. This week I even got it to do a firmware update via the internal application, it updated without a hitch.
I have set it up with two sets of mirrored drives. I figure if the hardware fails I can just plug the drive into a Linux box and retrieve all my data. Performance is reasonable for a piece of hardware costing under $400. I have started to use the iSCSI option. This gives me a permanent network drive on my Windows 7 computer but should work with other operating systems as long as they have the iSCSI initiator. For those of you confused by some of the terms, Wikipedia has some good articles that explain the technology.
The latest firmware comes with a media server. Setting it up is a bit tricky as the wizard does not do a complete job. Dumping the media into the directories and streaming it was not the problem, it worked out of the box. Do you think I could access the server administration part of it to rename the source, $%#$@$. It turned out that the Twonky Media server has set itself up for only local administration so I could not access it from the network. I found the answer on the QNAP forum. It looked a bit complex at first but if you follow the bouncing ball it is very simple and not beyond the scope of any moderately computer savvy amateur.
If you check on the QNAP site you will also find an enormous amount of packages available for download and installation. check the QPKG directory under Resources. There is everything from web servers, WordPress servers, surveillance camera software, stats, database engines, the list just goes on. See what I mean by versatile
Likes
- Reasonable performance
- Great as a backup server (Cobien backup with iSCSI initiator)
- So versatile
- Easyish to set up
Dislikes
- Can leave loose ends during setup which need a trawl through the forums to fix
Conclusion
All things considered the value from such a cheap NAS is amazing. It does not come with drives but takes a wide selection of units that are on the market. Obviously the drives selected will have an impact on the performance as well as the RAID options chosen. The fastest configuration being the RAID 0 option but there is no redundancy. Lose one drive and you have lost your data. That is not a limitation of the unit it is the limitation of how it has been configured. QNAP has a full compatibility list for each of their units on their website.
I really think this is a great product for the money. When my old TS109 finally dies I will probably replace it with the updated version. I recommend this unit for people with a medium knowledge of computing. Newbies may be running to friends for some help. However that said once the NAS is configured it should just continue to work.
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