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Hardware LG N2B1D Review

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Lizard, 11 Oct 2010.

  1. Lizard

    Lizard @ Scan R&D

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  2. Sgt.Bilko

    Sgt.Bilko What's a Dremel?

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    Hi there, is it just me or, does this review only seem half finished.
    Where are the temps, application access/usability evaluation for iTunes etc, the build quality and finally the conclusion?
    I was just getting into it, and it was over.
     
  3. hbeevers

    hbeevers Yes, it can play crysis!

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    Yeah it is pretty short, also you say that 'the fact that the N2B1D costs just £200 is quite a commercial feat' yet you only gave it 6/10 for value?!
     
  4. vampalan

    vampalan What's a Dremel?

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    Looks strangely like a Shuttle PC
     
  5. mrbens

    mrbens What's a Dremel?

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    Yes I thought it was strange ending with graphs instead of a conclusion and why is the score on the first page instead of at the end like normal?

    Anyway, not here to moan, I wouldn't mind getting one of these NAS boxes but think I'm going to put all my hard drives in a seperate PC case and access them from my main PC and just have my SSD in my main PC as normal hard drives make too much noise.
     
  6. matee

    matee What's a Dremel?

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    Drop the BD, lower the price and I might consider one..
     
  7. GW42

    GW42 What's a Dremel?

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    Netgear Stora - £50 @ ebuyer at the moment. Takes 2 drives, and out of the box that's limited to mirroring. However, with the recent official firmware update you can either do RAID 1 or JBOD (no raid 0 but obviously fairly pointless in a NAS that's speed limited by the network controller rather than the drives).

    Speeds I'm getting are pretty much the same as these. Tends to be about 20-23MB/s for large video files, was about 10-13MB/s for a large folder of 1-4MB photos last night. I'm guessing for smaller files it would be similar speeds to this LG.

    The stora is not perfect by any means. Certainly anyone on this website should look at it carefully before buying as the flexibility is quite limited. But if all you want is a low power NAS that you can map as network drives on >1 pc without bells & whistles (& personally I prefer to keep it simple and not install extra software), then for £50 it's worth looking at.

    EDIT: I am assuming the LG is without drives. The linked product page on CC Online is bare NAS box only. Should go without saying that the £50 stora is just the box with no drives!
     
  8. jimbok11

    jimbok11 What's a Dremel?

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    "However, if you don’t want or need an optical drive in your NAS box then it might be worth holding off till you see what else we've tested recently as there are much faster and easier to use NAS boxes out there."...such as?

    Alternatives would be nice...unless they are linked somewhere and I'm just being idiotic...
     
  9. Adnoctum

    Adnoctum Kill_All_Humans

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    The BD burner is quite a good idea. I suppose there are people who would want to backup to an optical BD straight from the NAS, but it is a bit of a niche product. Still, anything to differentiate your product.
    The DVD drive version is incredibly pointless. Can you imagine backing up your files from a multi-TB NAS to optical disk 4.7/8.5GB at a time? It would be hell.

    Personally, I'm a recent Synology convert.

    My NAS needs used to be supplied by a Buffalo Linkstation in RAID 1 and a custom built server running Server 2003 with a hardware RAID card and multiple HDD. I found a need to change when I needed more space. Although the Buffalo supported 1.5TB drives in RAID 1, it was very unstable and sloooww. And the server box was a former desktop machine that sucked down the juice to no real purpose. So a replacement was sought.

    After much research and thought I chose the Synology DS410j for a good, affordable, full featured home NAS.
    Best choice I could have made!
    Couldn't be simpler to set up a 3x1.5TB RAID 5 array, as well as user accounts and mapping network drives. Really, my mum could have done it with guidance from me over the phone (not quite autonomous enough for networking!). Bit slow building the array, but that is to be expected.
    So much easier than my old Buffalo box, not to mention the Netgear crap I once had to work with.
    It was immediately obvious that someone had put some thought into creating the UI and documentation, which from my experience is unusual for a Taiwanese technology company as they all seem to enjoy getting their pimply work experience youth with unmedicated ADHD to design their UI.

    How good is this? Synology has created a live demonstration of their NAS UI online, so you can log in and try it out before buying, playing with settings and making user accounts. It really went a long way to making up my mind up and buying Synology over QNAP and Thecus alternatives. I also got to try out QNAP's live demo version as well. I don't think Thecus does something similar.

    The single bay DS110j is about £110 or so.
    The 2-bay DS210j is about £150 or so.
    The 4-bay DS410j is about £250 or so.
     
  10. Burdman27911

    Burdman27911 What's a Dremel?

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    Does this (or the synology Adnoctum mentioned) support 2TB drives? I convinced myself to pickup up a Netgear ReadyNAS (one of the higher end ones used from a friend) but then the deal fell through so I'm back to looking for a good NAS.

    I'd definitely be interested in seeing more of these NAS reviews (and more detail would be nice, but I understand).
     
  11. Adnoctum

    Adnoctum Kill_All_Humans

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  12. Andy Mc

    Andy Mc Modder

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    Personally I'd rarther spend the money building an itx freenas box. More flexiblity (I could use ZFS) and it would get faster network transfer rates.
     
  13. Adnoctum

    Adnoctum Kill_All_Humans

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    Or you could do what I did:
    - Get NAS.
    - Fit HDD.
    - Set NAS to build array.
    - Watch new episode of Chuck + comfy pants + beverage of choice.
    - Fill NAS with ???

    Normally I wouldn't be caught dead buying a pre-built box because they are all either pitifully weak or stupidly over priced compared to what I could build (plus, I actually like building systems). But I thought that once I'd purchased an ITX board (cheaper Atom boards don't have a 1000 NIC) and 4-port RAID card (and assuming I could recycle a desktop case) it would be similar in price and features to buying a good NAS device.

    It's all horses for courses, isn't it? For me, I'd done the custom storage box build before and I just wanted something that was quick and easy and which I didn't need to think about.
    It uses less power, is quieter, looks good in any environment (desk, office, living room, reclining provocatively on a bed) and is just as fully featured as FreeNAS, while it required no fiddling to get working (I plugged it in and it just worked). And all I had to sacrifice was the higher transfer speeds that a custom solution would offer, but then I'm not using it all the time to care.
     
  14. Adnoctum

    Adnoctum Kill_All_Humans

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    Last edited: 13 Oct 2010
  15. Cleggmeister

    Cleggmeister Of reasonable knowledge...

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    Am I alone in thinking... "Why doesn't the bluray drive act as a ripper, thereby allowing users to rip and store their movie and music collections on the NAS"?

    Currently I'm aware of only a couple of products that do this; the Tranquil AVA RS3 and the RipNAS. Both are priced above £650, but at least include the ripping and serving software that most users need.
     
  16. bsevern

    bsevern What's a Dremel?

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    Actually you can use the blu-ray burner as a ripper which is exactly why I bought this. Use iSCSI and the drive shows up on your local PC as a local drive . A LG BH10NS30 to be exact, which is a 10X BD writer, or a 12X DVD writer. It works on my GE network quite well with just about any DVD software, the iSCSI is quite a brilliant design as long as your network is fast (wouldn't recommend it over wireless, even 802.11N).

    Also as of the 2557 firmware update it officially supports 2TB drives (actually I believe there's even a 2.5TB drive listed on the LG drive compatibility list).

    I picked this up with a 1TB drive a couple of weeks ago for $249 USD and also got a $35 gift card with it...perfect for my first order of blank blu-ray discs :)
     
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