NAS Buying Guide

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Drobo 5N 5-Bay Review

I recently spotted a review by John Pozadzides over on Amazon of the Drobo 5N NAS, a five bay NAS device intended primarily for a small office environment. Normally I don't bring up a lot of Amazon reviews because the quality levels can be all over the place, but this one seems pretty well considered and written.
According to the review, the 5N continues Drobo's trend toward reliable and high performance units with good features, while still retaining a relatively low price point for the

Iomega StorCenter px2-300d Review

TechCrunch recently put up a review of the Iomega StorCenter px2-300d, a two bay NAS intended for use primarily in small or medium sized business environments. We've already seen a review a couple of weeks ago by PCMag.com, but it's always good to get a second opinion before putting down hundreds on a piece of hardware you might be using for years.

Overall, they seemed to like to px2-300d, though they had some trouble getting the cloud functionality working correctly. From their

Synology DiskStation DS213 Review

TestFreaks recently put up a review of the Synology DiskStation DS213, a two bay NAS device intended primarily for small business use. The TestFreaks review is quite comprehensive, including unboxing and unit detail photos as well as software screenshots. The performance benchmarks against other Synology products are particularly useful, so if you're looking to replace your own aging Synology hardware you might want to the TestFreaks review there to take a look.

According to

UnRaid vs FreeNAS Discussion Thread

Still trying to decide between UnRaid and FreeNAS? Another thread recently cropped up on Overclock.net regarding the two, specifically deciding between the free version of UnRaid and the obviously free FreeNAS. The thread's still pretty young at the moment, and the thread originator eventually did decide on unRaid for the moment, but if you have some opinions on the subject feel free to head over to the Overclock.net thread in

Saturday, February 2, 2013

7 FreeNAS Alternatives Article

Looking for alternatives to FreeNAS? If for whatever reason you're not interested in FreeNAS but are looking to set up your personal NAS, there's a post over on TechShout that you might want to take a look at.
There are multiple reasons behind looking for FreeNAS alternatives. Despite the software being a popular choice and also intuitive to use for sharing content across multiple platform like Linux, Apple and Windows, there are always a few drawbacks that could make it a tedious

FreeNAS Alternatives Article

Thecus N2800 Noise Questions

I recently spotted a question over on SpiceWorks regarding the Thecus N2800 and the amount of noise that it generates. From the original post:
I have seen good reviews on the overall build and net speed of the Thecus N2800 NAS, but a single review has put strong emphasis on its high noise. I have read that the Synlogy DS212+ has a similar feature set but is much quieter.

SpiceWorks
The review the poster mentioned might be about the Bit-Tech review I posted on previously - at least it's

Windows Home Server 2011 Discussion Thread

I recently spotted a discussion thread over on the AVS Forum regarding Windows Home Server 2011. Specifically, the thread asks why is Windows Home Server preferable over just using the basic sharing functions available in most modern Windows platforms such as Windows 7?

Considering that the question is being asked from a home use perspective, this is a pretty reasonable thing to ask. The speeds provided by Windows 7 and up in sharing are more than sufficient for most activities that