News TRENDnet TN-200 NAS Box Review

No: FreeNAS is only available for x86 processors, and the TN-200 (in common with the majority of NAS boxes) runs an ARM chip.

 

For £25 more - after cashback - you can get an HP MicroServer N54L, which includes four 3.5" bays with hot-swap capability (if you install a modified BIOS,) gigabit Ethernet, six external USB 2.0 ports and one internal, an eSATA 3Gb/s port, a 5.25" bay, VGA output, 2GB of RAM (expandable to 16GB) and a dual-core x86-64 AMD Turion II processor. Sure, it's a little bigger - but not that much - but by *god* is it a lot more flexible. I've seen people stick four 3.5" drives in the main bays, four 2.5" drives in an adapter in the 5.25" bay and boot from USB for a total of 24TB of raw storage before you even start thinking about an external eSATA chassis. Oh, and you can stick whatever OS you like on it - I've even seen people running Windows and adding in a low-profile graphics card to the PCIe x16 slot for gaming and high-definition media playback, although why you'd do that I really don't know...

I love mine. Getting 120MB/s raw throughput over the network, and around 90-odd encrypted via SSH using the AES128-CBC cipher - a higher throughput than any of the NAS boxes in the test group, I note...

 

Ta-da: open source alternatives to Windows Home Server. It's a little old, but a good place to get started. These days, I'd probably recommend FreeNAS for a pure NAS experience, OpenMediaVault for multimedia storage and streaming, and Ubuntu Server for general-purpose server usage. I'm running the latter on mine.

 

Yes, but it's cheaper from ServersPlus (use code MSFREENDUK at checkout for free delivery.)

Officially, it supports 8GB; it works just fine with 16GB, though.

Simplicity - they want a plug-and-play solution; space - the MicroServer has a larger footprint than a two-bay NAS, so if you're only needing two drives it's a bit of a waste in space terms; ignorance - they don't know it exists; price - the MicroServer is under £100 at the moment 'cos HP is offering a £100 cash-back deal to clear stock of the old generation, but when the offer isn't on you'll likely pay upwards of £200 for the same hardware.

There are actually six SATA ports: four on the hot-swap backplane, one internal for the 5.25" bay, and one eSATA. Your options include using a SATA multiplexor or - the cheaper and simpler method - sticking a four-port SATA card in one of the two PCI Express slots. Added bonus: you can get a PCIe card offering SATA 6.0Gb/s, instead of the on-board ports which are SATA 3.0Gb/s.

Don't do a mirrored stripe - you just bring down the likelihood of losing all your data to the same as running a single drive, and the added performance will gain you nothing 'cos the network is limited to an absolute maximum throughput of 125MB/s. Literally, it wouldn't matter if your array could handle 500MB/s - the most you will see out of them over a gigabit network is around 120MB/s.

My advice: if you're comfortable with RAID (which is for availability, not backup - sorry, I am obliged to point that out in any given RAID discussion) then run a two-drive mirror. That's what I do: two 2TB drives in a Btrfs mirror. One drive dies, no data lost; silent corruption gets detected in a monthly scrub and corrected using the intact data from the second drive; and I have the added benefit of snapshotting, offline deduplication (currently broken, sadly) and fast LZO compression. This is all in *addition* to regular backups, though: Btrfs is still experimental, and there's a non-zero chance I'll wake up one day to find the filesystem has gone non-linear and deleted everything.

 

We're getting increasingly off-topic here (my fault entirely), but I've replied to your edit above. If you've not used RAID and you're not using Btrfs or a similar filesystem with in-built RAID-like functionality, I'd honestly suggest not bothering. Instead, set up a single disk to use as storage and a second disk to use as a backup for the first. Set up a nightly schedule to copy new and changed content from the first disk to the second. Much simpler than RAID, and you can use something like rsync with the --link-dest option to create dated and incremental backups, allowing you to take any file back to any version in its history - something that pure RAID doesn't offer, always giving you the latest version of any given file even if said version is corrupt. (Have I mentioned RAID isn't a backup?)

 

Blimey, how did you get that so low? Mine, measured at the wall, draws 21W idle and 35W under load - and that's after a *lot* of tweaking.

 

If you've done no tweaking, I'd expect that your MicroServer (assuming it's the same N54L model) will draw more like 25W at idle - mine did, out-the-box and with three drives spun down.

Aye - a saving of £23 a year at current electricity prices compared to my 21W MicroServer. Certainly something to take into consideration!

 

If it helps put the above into perspective, the Synology DS213j is £60 more expensive (wiping out three years' of energy savings), only two-bay, and slower. The Synology software is lovely, though, I'll give it that.

Dunno where HP's measuring it from, 'cos mine is just shy of 21cm wide, 26cm tall and 26cm deep. About 4cm wider, 2cm taller (remember there's a half-height 5.25" bay, hot-swap sleds and room for two low-profile PCIe cards in there) and 3cm deeper than Synology's four-bay DS413j. Which, incidentally, is £230(!)

EDIT: Just to confirm, and with apologies in advance for the terrible quality - the server's in a relatively inaccessible and dark corner of the office - here's a rough measurement: