I spent a ton of time looking for the perfect storage solution for myself and ended up with a Synology CS407 [1]. I just figured I’d share this knowledge with you, as I just wasted 3 hours of my life finding it and don’t want anyone else to do the same.
Backstory:
I’m getting a MacBook (sooner or later) and when I do, it won’t have enough storage on it to satisfy me. This would normally mean that whenever I move back and forth from MD to NYC to Long Island that I’d have to lug my desktop around with me and keep it powered on at all those places. Right now I’m barely getting by with port-forwarded SSH and a DynDNS account.
My requirements were:
- Can connect to a stock MacBook (USB or Network)
- Supports at least RAID 5
- Space for at least 4 SATA drives
- Comes empty
- Portable (somewhat)
- Quiet
What I found was that USB enclosures generally don’t have RAID 5 and they’re fairly rigid with the features they can offer. NAS was a better solution because of its flexibility. One of the first products I found that satisfied my requirements was an Intel SS4000-E [2], but I found out later it was a 1st gen product and it sucked [3]. Then I found SmallNetBuilder (formerly TomsNetworking) has a NAS section and I narrowed it down to an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ [4] [5], a Synology CS406 [6], and a Thecus N5200 [7].
At that point it became a fight between the small and featureful CS406 and the blazing fast N5200. As I’m not doing video editing or anything else that would require blazing speed, I picked the Synology CS406. I checked their website [1] and they had a newer model available. TigerDirect stocks them for $660 [8].
I should also mention that if you’ve got free time on your hands, spare hardware, and no need for a small and quiet enclosure there’s a great FreeBSD-based distribution called FreeNAS [9] that can help you get going with a DIY NAS. If I wasn’t so sick of building computers I might just go down that route…
[1] http://www.synology.com/enu/products/CS407/index.php
[2] http://www.intel.com/design/servers/storage/ss4000-E/index.htm
[3] http://forumz.tomshardware.com/network/Intel-RAID-NAS-Makes-Grade-ftopict21360.html#83416
[4] http://smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29829/75/
[5] http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/12/infrant-releases-the-readynas-nv/
[6] http://smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/28618/75/
[7] http://smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/29616/75/
[8] http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3032754&CatId=2670
[9] http://www.freenas.org/
