Hothardware.com has an interesting nine page article covering Thecus, QNAP and Netgear NAS servers. The article starts with the obligatory introduction suggesting that a NAS device can be a good substitution for cloud storage if you want more control:
Cloud-based storage solutions are all the rage these days, but if you don't want to trust your files to a third-party data center and deal with the risk of hacker attacks and unexpected downtime, maintaining your own centralized storage platform is the way to go. This is where network attached storage (NAS) devices come into play. With hard drive prices as cheap as they are, owning your own NAS box is a totally viable option for wrangling your data, automating backup routines, and serving up files to a growing number of connected devices, including tablets, notebooks, smartphones, game consoles, set-top boxes, and more. Plus, there are no monthly or annual subscription fees to deal with.
They invited a number of NAS makers to participate in a three to five drive NAS shootout - Thecus, QNAP and Netgear submitted NAS servers for the test. All testing was done with Western Digital 3 TB Red hard drives supplied by Western Digital except for the Netgear unit which came pre-loaded with hard drives supplied by Netgear. The Netgear unit was tested two ways - with the supplied hard drives (Seagate) and with the Western Digital "Red" drives:
While all these NAS boxes support a variety of configurations, including RAID 0, we focused our attention on RAID 5 performance. RAID 5 requires the use of at least three drives and offers a cost effective balance of performance and redundancy. We're also including benchmarks from Netgear's proprietary X-RAID2 format using the drives that shipped with the ReadyNAS Pro 4 (four 2TB Seagate Constellation ES).
Using Intel's NAS Performance Toolkit, the QNAP unit, predictably, came out on top:
Overall, QNAP came out on top by posting the best scores in 8 out of 12 categories (two-thirds). QNAP was especially strong in the HD Video Record, where it benched 125.2MB/s versus 112MB/s (Thecus), 87.6MB/s (Netgear X-RAID2), and 84.3MB/s (Netgear RAID 5).
The conclusion of the three-way NAS comparison makes interesting reading.
Related articles
- Another Western Digital Red NAS Hard Drive Review (nas-pro.com)
- Thecus vs. QNAP (nas-pro.com)
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