Dylan M. HUGHES

(My storage setup, before and after)

Finding a decent home backup solution when dealing with terabytes of data is daunting challenge. Backing up to DVDs is a waste of time and plastic, and with hard drives cheaper than ever there’s no economical advantage. External hard drives are cheap but provide no protection for your data, if a drive fails all your precious projects, photos, videos are gone. This also applies to the Apple Time Capsule, one hard that with all your data, it’s not if it will fail, but when.
So having setup some basic requirements for a backup solution I set off on a research session…

My basic requirements were:

• Low power consumption, nothing greater than 50watts, ideally a lot less.
• Non-proprietary file system(i.e not Drobo). If the device fails I want access to my data without having to get another identical unit
• Some sort of RAID setup with at least 4-bays
• Under $800 with 4x2TB drives, ideally less
• Ideally 4TB+ of usable storage space
• Ability to expand array when larger drives become available
• Network Attached(NAS) or Desktop Attached USB, FW, eSata(DAS)

I could easily eliminate two from the list. The Drobo uses a proprietary file system. And building a box with FreeNAS or any of the other “NAS” distros would be very tricky to build without it being an energy hog, building something cheap is great, but after you realize it’s sucking three times the power of a device designed only for storage, it’s not a very attractive option.

There are a lot of eSata/USB or FW enclosures on the market, many around $200, at first this seemed perfect, they’re cheap, they’re faster than any consumer NAS, but there are issues, no sub $400 models I found would allow you to expand the RAID array, so if you put in 4x2TB drives and fill it up, you’re stuck, to upgrade to the latest drives, you’d have to find another device and move all your data over, not something I wanted to tackle down the road. I also couldn’t find one that actually looked like the hardware was decent quality. The one I was most tempted by is made by AC&NC, the Jetstor 405u but at over $700 without drives it was out of my range.

After eliminating the RAID Enclosure idea, I narrowed it down to a QNAP or Synology NAS, it was tough to figure out which to go with, both have their own advantages but I decided that power consumptions was more important to me than speed, so the QNAP won. For a 2-Bay unit I might go for a Synology unit, they’re slightly cheaper and the power consumption seems pretty close.

I ended up going with the QNAP TS-410model, this is their low-end 4-bay home/small business NAS. The higher end models increase or upgrade the processor speed and the amount of memory, but run the same OS/Web GUI. Once you get to the $800+ boxes you start to see a large increase in performance.

I bought 4x2TB Samsung F4 2TB Drives, these are some of the most highly rated drives on the market, they run at 5400RPM but with 3 platters instead of the usual 4 for 2TB drives, this results in higher performance, close to that of a 7200RPM drive. Only complaint is they’re rather noisy.

I went with a RAID5 array with no hot spare resulting in 5.5TB of usable space and 1 drive redundancy.

Impressions.

The hard drive bays are flimsy/cheap. The web interface is a lot nicer than I thought it would be. Initial setup took just over an hour, you enter your network settings, timezone, user info, RAID configuration. Once this completes the NAS is fully usable, but it’s still synchronising the RAID array which took 23 hours and slowed the machine down considerably.

On a 10/100 network I was getting a constant 10.5MBs via FTP. With a gigabit router I’m getting 22-23.5MB/s. You’ll notice the machine is pushed to it’s limits at 23MB/s, if you are using the web based admin/control panel while transferring your speeds will drop to under 19MB/s, so make sure you disable any unwanted services to maximize performance.

Streaming 1080p HD video doesn’t seem to be an issue with either connection.

Power consumption:

27-30 Watts when actively using it,

(this doesn’t seem to fluctuate much whether you’re stressing it or lightly using it.)

24 Watts when drives are spun down

11 Watts without drives

3 Watts when turned off, but still plugged in

If you’re looking for a backup solution that offers redundancy, terabytes of storage and is budget friendly I think you’ll find either a Synology or QNAP system to be about as good as you can get for the money. If you don’t need 3TB+ of storage the 2-bay options are quite nice and are only slightly larger than a desktop hard drive enclosure.