Because you don't need high end parts for a NAS? Its for file serving. The same reason you don't need high end parts for do 4k video, its all down to what is just needed. In fact the specs are overkill in what normal usage is needed.
Looks pretty good. But let me guess, $800 or more without drives? In other words cheaper to go DIY with way more power? That seems to be how the NAS industry works.
On same note "cheaper" is not always better. I'm not sure with the OS this company uses, but synology makes everything so simple with its UI its kinda dumb proof for a business/average home user. Which is the exact point of a NAS. I built a home server before, this time when upgraded i just went with synology because less hassle than other one. It literally took less than 30min to setup..haven't needed to touch it since.
The reason i built my own originally was the same reason most did, DYI was really only way to do streaming HD quality stuff because commercial NAS never took advantage of both worlds..they had file server OR media server if wanted to do that. So build own to do both.
Now, no need because every NAS you buy can do that pretty much.
The biggest advantage a home/consumer NAS offers is the easy to use software. Then comes the actual package (the actual case, the size, the hot-plugging caddies, etc.). You can build a better or cheaper one and you can use software that could be way more powerful but far won't be nowhere as convenient as a small prebuilt NAS box with its own OS.
Some folks like to think in IT the 'hard way' is the only way. When IT is you job any unnecessary setting up and maintenance is to be avoided at all costs. 'Simple & Does the job' everytime.
To transcode media, compress filed and run other relevant tasks? Not to mention that the CPU might well become a bottleneck if one puts an SSD in one of those bays for caching, especially with multiple users.
Also if you plan on having 1500 users doing small writes, transcoding 8K to 1080p, and compressing binaries using xz and the extreme profile it will probably not be enough. o_O
But seriously though, if your use case requires SSD for caching, transcoding, and compressing enough of the time (not just the occasional peak) to justify the hardware then you're looking at the wrong NAS to begin with.
I have a machine with J1900 that serves a home, does some additional firewalling, pulls NAS duty, VPN server, transcoding from 1080p to 720p, and the occasional experiment of all sorts and I can say I don't feel limited in all but a very few corner cases. And they're definitely not able to justify running a larger, hotter, more power hungry box at all times.
You have to pick you HW for what you need and it will cost. That HW that costs pennies, is free to maintain forever, but has more processing power than a football field sized supercomputer is currently out of stock.
How is hardware RAID any more "real" than software RAID? You're executing same tasks on a different CPU, which nowadays is completely needless as general purpose CPUs are powerful enough for simple XORing ;)
RAID6, spare drive(s), availability of entire array as a block device to the OS, not running a hobby operating system in order to be able to use the drives. Not wasting CPU power on software calculations for raid.
With 10GbE? While that's still enough to get a 10GbE card alongside a decent ITX board, cheap CPU far superior to this, Ram, PSU and case (though without hot-swap and much larger) that's not as bad as I would have thought. Still, I'd much rather go the DIY route.
While I agree with you and have 4 DIY NAS machines, I think you are kind of missing the point of these things. They aren't meant for people who can build their own NAS. They are meant for those who need a file server that works out of the box with little configuration These also come with a warranty and tech support. DIY does not.
Absolutely. It's just that that market is rather small. The featureset is too limited for most SMBs, and the price is far too high for most consumers. With DIY-capable enthusiasts also excluded, the target market for this seems limited to home users with a lot of money, not that much time, a desire for 10GbE, but no desire for transcoding capabilities or other somewhat heavy loads. Meaning... rich photography enthusiasts, I guess? Not that there aren't many of those, but it's still ultimately a tiny market.
The NAS market needs to reach commodity pricing levels to increase sales, but can't get there by cutting features or performance -that'll just turn people off the idea and make them pay for cloud storage instead.
Valantar you have your market scales backwards. The "DIY-capable enthusiasts" are the small market the small business nas market is relatively large. Also I don't see any features this nas is missing that a business would expect from a nas in the sub $1000 price range.
As contrary to what you said nas are already at "commodity pricing levels " as you used the term. Remember the commodity Terramaster is selling is not at commodity hardware but a turn key data storage solution. Terramaster's pricing is in line with their competitors and online storage offerings from the tech giants. I'm sorry it's out of both of our budget but regardless that does not change reality.
There's no such thing as a commodity priced NAS. Even bottom-rung two-bay units are hard to find below $200 without drives - meaning several times the price of usb storage - and most cheap ones use such terrible hardware that they are performance limited by their CPU or other hardware, not the (already slow) HDDs. Most of these barely fulfill the base requirement of "store stuff on your home network", which means their utility to entry level users is minimal. Good solutions with good app support, decent automatic backups and the like do exist, but are normally not cheap enough, so most users would much prefer a simpler and cheaper cloud storage option that does what they need in a very streamlined fashion, or just a USB drive. Some of the cheaper units are even enclosed without easily swapped drives, which is the dumbest idea ever for a data backup device, even for home use where the drives are parked the vast majority of the time. The price jumps for adding more bays in the same series are also rather ridiculous, as you often pay several hundred dollars for what amounts to a larger enclosure, bigger SATA backplane and slightly heftier power supply - none of which are even remotely expensive parts when mass produced.
The problem is likely that commodity pricing requires high sales volumes for companies to stay afloat, which just doesn't happen with networked storage. And cloud storage is often free, otherwise cheap, and normally automatic with near zero configuration or even interaction, meaning that few home users even consider a NAS.
Also, I never said (or even implied) that the DIY-capable enthusiast market was in any way large, just that it's yet another potential market segment that is unlikely to buy an OTS NAS. Businesses are the only large NAS market, as they are the only market that has a direct need for both shared data storage and keeping data in-house, while also being used to expensive equipment purchases.
IMO most families could benefit quite a lot from a NAS, but it would then need to be relatively cheap, easily expandable (for longevity, nobody wants yet another recurring hardware purchase), as easy to use as cloud storage (including on your phone etc.) and easy to set up, while also being flexible enough in terms of configuration options to appeal to enthusiasts too. Without that you're limiting the product to a too small group of potential users for it to ever be successful.
I think you just have too high expectations from this (maybe based on your personal needs) and project them onto the world. Reality is that even 2 bay units sell pretty well. This kind of commodity NAS addresses a far wider market than the self built ones do. They require less skill and time to configure and operate.
While that's a fair point, Valantar, you have to remember that this is aimed as SOHO business owners. It's professional, rather than consumer(or prosumer, if you will) kit. It probably has the system support of an enterprise-level hardware, but I'm speculating at this point. For what it is, I'd say the price is fair in a business perspective.
If that's the case the price is indeed quite good - but the article frames it as a prosumer device. In which case it does seem to have pretty much everything one would want (except for that horribly anemic CPU), but it also pretty much limits its target audience to the "buys an iMac Pro for their hobby" demographic, i.e. a relatively small but wealthy group.
It's $599. Which, considering it's right off the CES shelf, that's not a bad price, really. A good SOHO solution for backing up and accessing critical data.
Time is money in the real world. I can walk into a business with one of these, unbox, setup in less than half and hour and be out the door. Then next to zero maintenance going forward. You try doing that with your Frankenstein homebrew FreeNas junk.
You know the world doesn't revolve around 'enthusiasts' that think they know how the world works.
In my experience all NASes are slow as hell. It's a bunch of spinning rust, asking it to find two files at the same time will cause it to fall over. 500 users is a bit of a joke, note it says concurrent support only, meaning you have to ask these 500 users to politely line up and only access it one at a time.
Mysteriously, putting SSDs in doesn't seem to help much, probably due to slow processor. There were some trials of NASes where HDDs were replaced with SSDs, and speeds only moved up a little bit.
The SSD cache is probably the best part as 5% of files probably see 80% of the use, and that's only available in high end NASes. Note for this one, the article only says that the OS 'supports' SSD caching, not that there is actually anywhere sensible inside the NAS to put it. It might well be that you have to give up one of the giant drive bays to a tiny SSD.
Five bays seems like it is meant to be used in RAID10 with an SSD in the fifth bay for caching. But the bays are all the same, in case you don't want to do that, and just use five disks in JBOD. There is nothing wrong with putting a small SSD in a giant drive bay. To me it looks like a pretty decent NAS.
The reason most NAS's don't show any improvement moving to SSD's is that they are connected to the network with gigabit ethernet, which a HDD can nearly saturate. A SSD will improve in terms of random access and latency, but it can't improve much in terms of total transfer speeds. Even with 10GigE, they are limited still by being on the SATA bus.
The upside though is that the need for mass transfer of large files is limited, the vast majority of backups are differential and the few employees who may be intentionally uploading large files (rather than working locally and letting the sync software deal with it in the background) can be handled by simply having a NAS with sufficient M.2 based cache.
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Tyler_Durden_83 - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
Why is every nas manufacturer using 4 years old parts?surt - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
Cheap, and sufficient.imaheadcase - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
Because you don't need high end parts for a NAS? Its for file serving. The same reason you don't need high end parts for do 4k video, its all down to what is just needed. In fact the specs are overkill in what normal usage is needed.Jorgp2 - Monday, January 20, 2020 - link
What's worse is that there's a quad core C3000 Series SoC in the same price range that has all the needed IO.It has 2x native 10G interfaces, and more than two SATA ports.
Valantar - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
Looks pretty good. But let me guess, $800 or more without drives? In other words cheaper to go DIY with way more power? That seems to be how the NAS industry works.imaheadcase - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
Why would you want way more power? Its a file server. You would hard pressed to use more of the CPU it has or ram with any task.imaheadcase - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
On same note "cheaper" is not always better. I'm not sure with the OS this company uses, but synology makes everything so simple with its UI its kinda dumb proof for a business/average home user. Which is the exact point of a NAS. I built a home server before, this time when upgraded i just went with synology because less hassle than other one. It literally took less than 30min to setup..haven't needed to touch it since.The reason i built my own originally was the same reason most did, DYI was really only way to do streaming HD quality stuff because commercial NAS never took advantage of both worlds..they had file server OR media server if wanted to do that. So build own to do both.
Now, no need because every NAS you buy can do that pretty much.
close - Monday, January 20, 2020 - link
The biggest advantage a home/consumer NAS offers is the easy to use software. Then comes the actual package (the actual case, the size, the hot-plugging caddies, etc.). You can build a better or cheaper one and you can use software that could be way more powerful but far won't be nowhere as convenient as a small prebuilt NAS box with its own OS.jabber - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Some folks like to think in IT the 'hard way' is the only way. When IT is you job any unnecessary setting up and maintenance is to be avoided at all costs. 'Simple & Does the job' everytime.Valantar - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
To transcode media, compress filed and run other relevant tasks? Not to mention that the CPU might well become a bottleneck if one puts an SSD in one of those bays for caching, especially with multiple users.close - Monday, January 20, 2020 - link
Also if you plan on having 1500 users doing small writes, transcoding 8K to 1080p, and compressing binaries using xz and the extreme profile it will probably not be enough. o_OBut seriously though, if your use case requires SSD for caching, transcoding, and compressing enough of the time (not just the occasional peak) to justify the hardware then you're looking at the wrong NAS to begin with.
I have a machine with J1900 that serves a home, does some additional firewalling, pulls NAS duty, VPN server, transcoding from 1080p to 720p, and the occasional experiment of all sorts and I can say I don't feel limited in all but a very few corner cases. And they're definitely not able to justify running a larger, hotter, more power hungry box at all times.
You have to pick you HW for what you need and it will cost. That HW that costs pennies, is free to maintain forever, but has more processing power than a football field sized supercomputer is currently out of stock.
timecop1818 - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
You don't need "more power" but I'd rather see these with a real hardware raid chip instead of doing software lunix raid.antonkochubey - Saturday, January 18, 2020 - link
How is hardware RAID any more "real" than software RAID? You're executing same tasks on a different CPU, which nowadays is completely needless as general purpose CPUs are powerful enough for simple XORing ;)timecop1818 - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
The part where it doesn't involve a hobby operating system and the part where entire array is presented as a single drive to the OS.tmanini - Saturday, January 18, 2020 - link
out of curiosity - what features do you use that are hardware RAID specific ?timecop1818 - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
RAID6, spare drive(s), availability of entire array as a block device to the OS, not running a hobby operating system in order to be able to use the drives. Not wasting CPU power on software calculations for raid.sdoorex - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
Starts at $600Valantar - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
With 10GbE? While that's still enough to get a 10GbE card alongside a decent ITX board, cheap CPU far superior to this, Ram, PSU and case (though without hot-swap and much larger) that's not as bad as I would have thought. Still, I'd much rather go the DIY route.oRAirwolf - Saturday, January 18, 2020 - link
While I agree with you and have 4 DIY NAS machines, I think you are kind of missing the point of these things. They aren't meant for people who can build their own NAS. They are meant for those who need a file server that works out of the box with little configuration These also come with a warranty and tech support. DIY does not.Valantar - Saturday, January 18, 2020 - link
Absolutely. It's just that that market is rather small. The featureset is too limited for most SMBs, and the price is far too high for most consumers. With DIY-capable enthusiasts also excluded, the target market for this seems limited to home users with a lot of money, not that much time, a desire for 10GbE, but no desire for transcoding capabilities or other somewhat heavy loads. Meaning... rich photography enthusiasts, I guess? Not that there aren't many of those, but it's still ultimately a tiny market.The NAS market needs to reach commodity pricing levels to increase sales, but can't get there by cutting features or performance -that'll just turn people off the idea and make them pay for cloud storage instead.
Skeptical123 - Saturday, January 18, 2020 - link
Valantar you have your market scales backwards. The "DIY-capable enthusiasts" are the small market the small business nas market is relatively large. Also I don't see any features this nas is missing that a business would expect from a nas in the sub $1000 price range.As contrary to what you said nas are already at "commodity pricing levels " as you used the term. Remember the commodity Terramaster is selling is not at commodity hardware but a turn key data storage solution. Terramaster's pricing is in line with their competitors and online storage offerings from the tech giants. I'm sorry it's out of both of our budget but regardless that does not change reality.
Valantar - Sunday, January 19, 2020 - link
There's no such thing as a commodity priced NAS. Even bottom-rung two-bay units are hard to find below $200 without drives - meaning several times the price of usb storage - and most cheap ones use such terrible hardware that they are performance limited by their CPU or other hardware, not the (already slow) HDDs. Most of these barely fulfill the base requirement of "store stuff on your home network", which means their utility to entry level users is minimal. Good solutions with good app support, decent automatic backups and the like do exist, but are normally not cheap enough, so most users would much prefer a simpler and cheaper cloud storage option that does what they need in a very streamlined fashion, or just a USB drive. Some of the cheaper units are even enclosed without easily swapped drives, which is the dumbest idea ever for a data backup device, even for home use where the drives are parked the vast majority of the time. The price jumps for adding more bays in the same series are also rather ridiculous, as you often pay several hundred dollars for what amounts to a larger enclosure, bigger SATA backplane and slightly heftier power supply - none of which are even remotely expensive parts when mass produced.The problem is likely that commodity pricing requires high sales volumes for companies to stay afloat, which just doesn't happen with networked storage. And cloud storage is often free, otherwise cheap, and normally automatic with near zero configuration or even interaction, meaning that few home users even consider a NAS.
Also, I never said (or even implied) that the DIY-capable enthusiast market was in any way large, just that it's yet another potential market segment that is unlikely to buy an OTS NAS. Businesses are the only large NAS market, as they are the only market that has a direct need for both shared data storage and keeping data in-house, while also being used to expensive equipment purchases.
IMO most families could benefit quite a lot from a NAS, but it would then need to be relatively cheap, easily expandable (for longevity, nobody wants yet another recurring hardware purchase), as easy to use as cloud storage (including on your phone etc.) and easy to set up, while also being flexible enough in terms of configuration options to appeal to enthusiasts too. Without that you're limiting the product to a too small group of potential users for it to ever be successful.
close - Monday, January 20, 2020 - link
I think you just have too high expectations from this (maybe based on your personal needs) and project them onto the world. Reality is that even 2 bay units sell pretty well. This kind of commodity NAS addresses a far wider market than the self built ones do. They require less skill and time to configure and operate.Averant - Saturday, January 18, 2020 - link
While that's a fair point, Valantar, you have to remember that this is aimed as SOHO business owners. It's professional, rather than consumer(or prosumer, if you will) kit. It probably has the system support of an enterprise-level hardware, but I'm speculating at this point. For what it is, I'd say the price is fair in a business perspective.Valantar - Sunday, January 19, 2020 - link
If that's the case the price is indeed quite good - but the article frames it as a prosumer device. In which case it does seem to have pretty much everything one would want (except for that horribly anemic CPU), but it also pretty much limits its target audience to the "buys an iMac Pro for their hobby" demographic, i.e. a relatively small but wealthy group.jabber - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Indeed. I've swapped out huge Dell servers that cost a small firm of say 10 people $500 a month in fees for a QNAP 2 bay NAS in RAID1.All they actually needed was a place to file share from and do backups to. That's all a lot of small firms require. No $10000 server required.
ksec - Saturday, January 18, 2020 - link
Source? That is quite expensive coming from TerraMaster.Averant - Saturday, January 18, 2020 - link
It's $599. Which, considering it's right off the CES shelf, that's not a bad price, really. A good SOHO solution for backing up and accessing critical data.https://www.terra-master.com/us/f5-422.html?page=d...
jabber - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Time is money in the real world. I can walk into a business with one of these, unbox, setup in less than half and hour and be out the door. Then next to zero maintenance going forward. You try doing that with your Frankenstein homebrew FreeNas junk.You know the world doesn't revolve around 'enthusiasts' that think they know how the world works.
Tomatotech - Friday, January 17, 2020 - link
In my experience all NASes are slow as hell. It's a bunch of spinning rust, asking it to find two files at the same time will cause it to fall over. 500 users is a bit of a joke, note it says concurrent support only, meaning you have to ask these 500 users to politely line up and only access it one at a time.Mysteriously, putting SSDs in doesn't seem to help much, probably due to slow processor. There were some trials of NASes where HDDs were replaced with SSDs, and speeds only moved up a little bit.
The SSD cache is probably the best part as 5% of files probably see 80% of the use, and that's only available in high end NASes. Note for this one, the article only says that the OS 'supports' SSD caching, not that there is actually anywhere sensible inside the NAS to put it. It might well be that you have to give up one of the giant drive bays to a tiny SSD.
katsetus - Monday, January 20, 2020 - link
Five bays seems like it is meant to be used in RAID10 with an SSD in the fifth bay for caching. But the bays are all the same, in case you don't want to do that, and just use five disks in JBOD. There is nothing wrong with putting a small SSD in a giant drive bay.To me it looks like a pretty decent NAS.
jabber - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Yeah RAID10 all the way, especially with the netowrk bandwidth this can push. Finally worthwhile.Reflex - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
The reason most NAS's don't show any improvement moving to SSD's is that they are connected to the network with gigabit ethernet, which a HDD can nearly saturate. A SSD will improve in terms of random access and latency, but it can't improve much in terms of total transfer speeds. Even with 10GigE, they are limited still by being on the SATA bus.The upside though is that the need for mass transfer of large files is limited, the vast majority of backups are differential and the few employees who may be intentionally uploading large files (rather than working locally and letting the sync software deal with it in the background) can be handled by simply having a NAS with sufficient M.2 based cache.