[geeks] QNAP review

[Nathan Raymond]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 2:47 PM, Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net> wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 05, 2016 at 02:34:55PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 09:30:35PM -0400, Shannon wrote:
> > >I am slowly working on a small review of the QNAP TS-453A NAS/server. I
> got a
> > >4-drive unit and will post my initial review soon I hope.
> >
> > I have a couple of 2-bay NAS units, one QNAP and one Synology, that I'll
> have
> > up for sale soon (with no drives).  Finally bit the bullet and built an
> > 8-drive FreeNAS/NAS4Free box.
> >
> > https://www.mrbill.net/nasbuild/
>
> No ECC ram or motherboard?  I thought that was highly recommended for ZFS.
>

That's my understanding, and also one of the things that's held me back
from getting a FreeNAS at home (i.e the extra cost of an ECC
motherboard/CPU/RAM), though I do think the iXsystems FreeNAS Mini hardware
platform looks pretty good for $999:

https://www.ixsystems.com/freenas-mini/

If I go the FreeNAS route personally, I would lean toward a hardware
solution from iXsystems. In the meantime, I have a Synology DS1515+ that I
upgraded to 16GB of RAM and a single 128GB SSD acting as a read cache for
the whole volume. Synology recently added BtrFS support, which I take it to
mean it's likely ready for production use, though I don't know how it
stacks up to ZFS currently (I know for a while ZFS had the advantage of
being the more mature solution, though my understanding is that the license
scheme will ultimately keep ZFS from becoming mainstream in the way that
BtrFS can).

- Nate