Hardware QNAP TS-219P II Turbo NAS Review

Sporting a 2GHz Marvel CPU, can the TS-219P II outstrip the competition?

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/10/08/qnap-ts-219p-ii-turbo-nas-review/1

 

Damn that's a bit pricey... For about the same money recently I bought a hp proliant microserver, 2x2tb hdds and a copy of whs2011... (after cashback) - I could have saved by using freeNAS on the internal usb port as well. The specs are similar too, ddr3, esata, gbe, but had 4/5 bays - albeit the cpu isn't quite as fast but hey...

 

+1 HP Micro server is still the champion of NAS and low-power home servers.

 

The limitation for me on NAS is physical size of the case. I'm currently getting by with 4x1TB+4x1.5TB running ZFS raidz on Nexenta, with another drive for the OS (where I don't care about redundancy). That gives me about 9TB raw storage, or about 6.8TB when you account for the redundancy. The hardware is hand-me-down stuff from my desktop machine, so in effect the cost is next to nothing, though I'd doubt I'd be able to sell it for more than 100GBP; E6700 + 4GB RAM.

Throughput is about 200MB/sec on the box itself, or about 90MB/sec over Ethernet. Being a real OS with real utilities, I can do a lot of processing on the actual box, e.g. using ffmpeg to transcode videos, or run bittorrent, run CrashPlan backup software (written in Java, it runs on the OpenSolaris kernel on Nexenta).

I've found it hard to find a case that has more bays though. I'd love to go up to 16 disks, but the jump is from ~150GBP for a case that can handle 9 drives comfortably to 2000GBP server-class rackmount cases with redundant power supplies and other stuff I don't need. What's really missing is a cheap consumer-level case that can take more than about 12 disks. They are almost impossible to find; the ones that are available are either only sold to trade, or sold to businesses with support contracts and massive markup.

 

Big Antec cases have loads of driver bays I am not sure but I think the Darkfleet 85 has more. Just use 5.2 to 2x 3.5 drive adapters in the ODD drive bay if you need more space.

 

I used this £45 case and converted the 9x external bays using 3 drive cages £13.18 each to allow 12 drives in my unRAID server. Using something like the Antec 1200 which has 12 external bays you could fit 16 drives.

BTW there are also cages that turn 3x bays to 5x drive slots but they cost about £90 each!

Also I'd highly recommend unRAID!

 

There are quite a few resellers for Norco's rackmount chassis, some with LUDICROUS numbers of bays (backplanes included). While a bit hard to get in the UK, if you shop around you can probably find a 20-bay chassis for under £350, and a 24-bay for around £400. If you can swing a shipping deal from the US, you can probably get them even cheaper. Compared to buying several traditional cases and a whole pile of 5-in-3 bays, it works out cheaper if you need that much space. Plus the backplanes connect straight to your SAS card/SAS expander, so you don't need a whole mess of port multipliers/breakout cables and nests of SATA cables everywhere.

 

This a "review" but you haven't even considered power consumption on a box that maybe left on 24/7... The only reason (I can see) why someone on this site would not use a homebrew solution... FAIL...