I also wanted a similar type of device like this with SSD to use as DAS (for NLE video) and NAS. The let down for me was port design. QNAP designs four USB-A ports on the back whereas they could easily have designed it with USB-C ports more appropriate to an M.2, NVMe-based NAS design.
QNAP TS-332X. 3 3.5" SATA slots and 3 M.2 SATA slots, equip everything with 2TB SATA3 drives, and you get 6Gb/s. Why bother about the last 4Gb/s, which are most probably unrealistic to get in most scenarios. You wrote in a later post, that you generat lots of data, so it might be better to have plenty of data with 6Gb/s instead of little to nothing with 10Gb/s.
Why would I go with TS-332X when TBS-453DX provides pretty much all I asked for just $80 more? 4 slots instead of 3 (great for RAID5), quiet (hopefully), small, and 10GbE is nice because I'm thinking about getting a beefy video editing desktop PC which will have a 10GbE port.
You can use SSD only in current NAS if wanted to. Just kinda silly to because SSD is still limited by network you are connected to. Zero anything you store is going to see a difference.
Only for transfers, which at home would be silly anyways because it is so fast. Unless you play on transfer of bluray rips constantly no point in it. Nothing you store now can't stream on regular 1gig network.
That's ridiculous. Ever heard of backing up TB's of steam library. Or TB's of photos and videos. Or running VM's. Or countless other things requiring high bandwidth and speed.
I make lots of videos with my iPhone, so it gets full every 2-3 months (256GB model). And I love watching those videos. So I have no idea what you mean by "digital millstone". I need the space and I need the speed. Currently I use a 6 yo Synology NAS with two WD 6GB green drives, but it's pretty slow and pretty noisy.
Your device can't transfer at 10 GigE, so you really can't use more than gigabit in even the best case scenario. You would be best served by a HDD based model that permits a SSD cache (either SATA or M.2) which would max out what your device can transfer.
comes to a top tech site.. suggests we join the luddites..
Im a home user with a mix of data sizes and my 2 disk nas is barely coping so, as anyone looking to upgrade now, why would I bother investing in a 4 bay today which _doesnt_ have a 10GbE route? It would be a waste of money as I expect the NAS chassis would last me for the next 5 years at least and sticking with 1Gb would handcuff me to 125MB/s max.
Since most terminals today have at least a cheap sata ssd it would be nice to have that as a baseline write speed around a home network at least as fast as sata 3 write speeds (~4GbE) and not be handcuffed to the write speed of a spinning mechanical HDD (~1GbE) when thats really going to be the doman of NAS going forward (and even there caching SSDs are becoming the norm).
So going forward why wouldnt anyone, not just professionals, spec for 10GbE where possible? NAS vendors get it, 10GbE cards are dropping below 100 now, other tech such as 2.5GbE USB dongles are starting to appear, all were waiting for is a line of (relatively) inexpensive consumer level 10GbE home switches and the market is set.
Gigabit ethernet gives you roughly 120 megs/sec 10 Gigabit ethernet gives you approximately 1.2 gigs/sec SATA3 tops out at roughly 550 megs/sec
Even with a SATA limited device, you'd have a massive benefit from having 10GigE vs 1GigE - from 120mb/sec to 550mb/sec.
With NVME we'll be capped even at 10GigE, but Wifi6 is just around the corner. For use cases like a small office with some users hardwired and some on laptops, it'd be nice to have the hardwire maxing out the 10GigE and Wifi6 sending out another couple hundred megs.
Ahhh yes so mostly junk then. Gonna be hilarious when folks reach the age of 55 and they have to spend thousands on power bills and cooling to keep their photo/data collection.
"Gonna have to switch off Grandad's data farm now kids!" Yuk!
If you are dealing in terabytes and terabytes of data o a regular basis you aren't using SSD's anyway due to cost of storage plus low density. And you really want to be running some form of RAID so you don't lose it all, which again reduces capacity.
The systems you want do exist and most of the higher end NAS' products include either 10Gb or a PCIe slot for you to install your own. And enough drive bays with M.2 caching to take advantage of it with SSDs. Not cheap of course, but it's a professional scenario.
@Reflex: I just ordered TBS-453DX together with four WD Blue M.2 2TB SSDs, which in RAID5 will provide 6TB. It will probably be at least a couple of years to fill it up, and by that time I'll upgrade to 4TB drives (or larger). Regarding 10GbE port - it's more of future proofing the system - I plan to buy a beefy video editing desktop PC soon which will have a 10GbE port, and I will probably buy a small 10GbE switch, and 4 SATA SSDs in RAID5 will most likely be able to saturate 10GbE link.
The key point is 'on a regular basis'. Anything less than a TB of data transfers more than fast enough to a SATA SSD or HDD with a M.2 cache (1TB NVMe drives are cheap). Unless one is routinely syncing multiple TB's with the NAS, which if your total capacity is 6TB and it will take 'years' to fill you aren't, this is overkill. Even in a scenario where you are working actively with terabytes of data on the fly rather than simply working on it locally and then syncing or uploading to the NAS, you are better off with a TB enclosure than an ethernet NAS.
My NAS currently has 32TB, I sync a ton of media to it and with a 1TB M.2 it's plenty fast enough, after all there are multiple limiters involved that aren't the network link both on the host and the clients.
I'm glad that you were able to buy the specifications you liked, however. My guess is in a couple years you realize you massively overspent for future proofing when you'd have been better off buying what you needed today and upgrading when your real world use cases justified it.
Problem is most of their lineups are in the stone age with 3.5" bays, big fans, and bulky form factors. The product TomaBgd pointed out is a rare bird, and they do charge for that rarity.
I would argue that a NAS doesn't need any of those. Most people have them out of hands reach anyways, pretty much dumb devices. Its why they have remote UI.
Yes, a NAS is rarely directly interacted with, and most of the devices that get plugged into the USB ports are things like a UPS for power stability, a printer for the print server and sometimes a WiFi dongle. These are not devices that need more than USB3.
If you want a NAS with SSD storage, you will want more than 10GbE. Minimum I would want would be dual 25GbE ports to be able to take advantage of the SSD. Reason for that is a 10 disk RAID50 array of 3.5" disks can flood a 10GbE link with ease on sequential writes.
Would it really matter either way? We are talking about NAS boxes so as long as the CPU isn't a bottleneck, the branding shouldn't be overly important.
Its still true that as long as the CPU is not a bottleneck, branding shouldn't be that important. Costs could be a factor as well, but brand agnostic buyers in many merchandise categories usually realize the best savings and most benefits for their expenditures.
Sure, if you aren't running a demanding app on your NAS the CPU does not matter much. But keep in mind a 'demanding app' can be as simple as Plex, which is supported on both and due to transcoding can hammer a CPU.
I think it's fair to ask where is Ryzen, and the response implying that it does not matter is incorrect. For those looking at full on Core based NAS units there is a use case, and once you go there asking for the more performant and less power hungry Ryzen variant is a reasonable request.
Of course it matters when you run a plex server. It could mean anywhere from 20 to 40% more cores or processing power for the same cost going from Intel to ryzen.
I don't agree with the whole "cloud" making NAS less appealing. Most people who get a NAS are content creators/media people in general. I don't think i know anyone who works with video/photos that just relies solos on cloud for storage.
Devices>NAS>cloud is pretty much what most do. Given that Synology for example has all the cloud build in for auto upload is perfect.
Also, while internet is a lot better than years past, not having a internet connection for some reason beyond control you will wish you had hard backups.
"Content creators/media people" are essentially small businesses.
There used to be a big market for personal media storage and local backups - this is when multiple vendors had units in the market with the standard Twonky Media Server and uPnP support. We don't see any vendors attempting that sort of product anymore because there is no market for that - closest is the WD My Cloud Home / Duo with its My Cloud OS 3.0 - even that continues to exist because WD can put in their own Red drives and release a new SKU with higher capacity on a regular basis.
That said, overall I echo your sentiments that this particular market segment must not die down. But, practically speaking, people in that segment will just have to migrate to a SMB-focused NAS unit that will have more features than necessary (and that will obviously cost extra)
Well not just audio/video but even books, and let's not forget the cloud charges quite a bit for their storage, never mind most people are on asymmetrical connections. Ransomware alone provides an incentive for local backups.
To be fair, I could pay for many years of cloud storage for what I paid for my NAS + storage, I put it together because I wanted to do more but I don't pretend its cheaper than just buying cloud storage, it isn't.
Also a home NAS is not a defense against ransomware, the backed up data will also be encrypted, and at least a cloud storage provider may detect this or offer versioning to roll back to safety.
Every year, i feel more and more like the proper NAS solution is to grab an old case* and motherboard, and just build your own.
*One of those old Antec or Cooler Master cases that used to be ubiquitous, with the mesh front and drive cages stacked floor to ceiling. From back when # of disks in your RAID was a key enthusiast metric instead of # of lumens in your lighting.
For the DIYer and hobbyist sure. It takes no small amount of time to set up, troubleshoot, and support your own solution. For the content creators/media users I'm sure they have more important things to do.
Power efficiency matters as 10W running 24x7x365 is an additional $10-$20 of annual cost. The vendor solutions come out ahead after only a few years in addition to coming with both software and hardware support.
I could build a NAS that would be cheaper and faster than the Syno NASs I have at home, and at work.
However, I already have plenty of stuff to support, so having something that works out of the box and has perfectly acceptable performance and is easy to use (and has a warranty...) is definitely of more value to me....I do enough work *at work*, I don't need to do more at home :-)
Remember Windows Home Server? It was awesome till MS abandoned it. BUT a developer actually made software that mimics it. Its is called Stablebit DrivePool . Basically build a PC, thrown in all the drives you want, install software, makes it all one huge drive. . Has everything you want, balancing, file protection, mirroring, cloud, even has a separate drive monitoring software that sends you alerts with drive problems if happens.
That's what I did for the longest time. Then I just went out and bought a reconditioned server (dual Xeons with 12c/24t) and dual redundant hotswappable PSUs.. Loaded it up with 32GB of DDR3 (and room for lots more), 3 & 4TB enterprise drives from HGST and Seagate and it runs CentOS with ZFS. Been absolutely solid and transcodes at 200+ fps. Cost (not including the drives) was about $250.00
When I got rid of my server like that a few years ago and replaced it with my high end QNAP NAS, my power bill (plus noise in the house) went down enough to pay the price difference in about two years. Also much less management headache.
The problem with the consumer NAS market is that they've done a very poor job marketing a product that has never reached commodity pricing, meaning that the only people buying them have been those already interested on their own and willing to pay for the privilege of not having a product pitched to them. When even Atom-based 4-bay units easily exceed $400 without drives anyone should be able to understand how the average user would rather pay for something simpler (online backup, external storage) or use a convenient free solution.
I do all media storage on my HTPC, and will be spinning that out into a separate HTPC and DIY NAS for the next upgrade cycle. The price alone has been enough to make me dismiss any notion of buying a NAS. Sure, I'll need to learn how to set up FreeNAS or a similar OS, but I'll get a far more flexible, powerful and fully featured product for a far lower price. I completely understand that the vat majority of people are neither willing nor able to do this, but as a PC enthusiast already quite frankly I don't see this as much more of a commitment than buying an off-the-shelf NAS - and for the average user I can't imagine buying a NAS feels any less daunting than building one.
The lesson of history is that people don't learn from history.
In the 1990s, Intel crushed the competition in medium-to-high performance processors. In terms of price-performance nobody could compete so companies that made RISC workstations such as Sun, SGI and IBM were pushed out of the market.
Circa 2000 NAS and router devices tried to save money on chips by using MIPS and other low-performance and even lower performance-price ratio products. I saw so many devices that struggled to serve files over SMB in that time frame, took forever to boot, etc. You might save 10% on the BoM using that kind of chip, but then take a 10x cut in performance, and then the vendor would feel like they have to shortchange you on memory.
Circa 2010 Intel decided it wanted to dominate the market for "low performance but expensive for what you get" just around the time that medium-performance ARM chips became a commodity product that was well priced. Companies like Samsung still work overtime to put junk chips in devices like the SmartThings hub, but "penny wise and pound foolish" is the definition of the modern enterprise.
I got a cheap tower server that was built locally, with a real i5 processor. I know enough not to mess around with Atom or Celeron, you won't really save money but you will get a huge performance loss that just isn't it worth it. (Now American car companies would make bad small cars and change the name every few years... Why doesn't Intel do that? At that point they might fool somebody twice instead of once.)
The specs of my machine are on an entire different level. I think in 2020 a Linux machine with just 1G of RAM is going to struggle to boot, never mind serve files. My server has 32GB, and it has a lot of USB 3 ports that I can use to move content on and off removable drives, mobile devices, etc. My machine has a 1050GTX graphics card so it can transcode video without working a sweat.
What people just don't get today is that people DO NOT experience the mean or median performance, what makes your computer painful to use is the 95-99% percent slowdowns and the answer to that, if you value your time, your frustration, your attention, your blood pressure, etc. is that you need to have more power than strictly necessary. If you try to lowball the specs and do it with non-commodity pricing you are getting the worst of both worlds.
It seem that I have to wait Many year more... an affordable 10Gb 4 to 5 storage nas with One or two slot m2 ssd cache. Most options Are enterprice level devices with more space than I ever need or slow 1Gb or 2.5gb lan speeds...
> an affordable 10Gb 4 to 5 storage nas with One or two slot m2 ssd cache.
For me this is the ideal baseline 4 bay prosumer unit going forward too, but im sure the NAS vendors know this. Dont forget to add on the time lag waiting for a residential 10gbe switch, the home market is still waiting on an affordable consumer unit, and then motherboards need to start offering 5 or 10gbe as standard then we can truly wave bye to 1gbe.
I have allready 10gb motherboard, and 10gb swich are now from $150 to $450 for my needs... Only nas are not there yet, unles i buy 12 bay enterprice nas... I have a lot of files, but no so much and not ready pay $1500+ for that huge box.
I have a two-bay Intel-based Synology NAS which replaced one of their earlier ARM units and has worked well as a media tank. That said, I note that the Twonky Media Server I use there for DLNA has apparently gone under per the Wikipedia article: "Twonky Server was maintained all the time by the former TwonkyVision employees which worked for the German subsidiary Lynx Germany GmbH. Lynx Germany GmbH was shut down 10/2018". I'm unsure if the US division is maintaining it...
Don't understand why some would like to go for NAS equipped with SSD only at this point - one day SSDs will be cheaper than HDDs but we're not there yet. Currently a set up with HDDs and SDDs as cache makes the most sense for me. This of course has to go in line with a proper network connection (10 GboE or Thunderbolt 3). Synology has announced a DS1620xs mid 2019 but has still not released it so I have finally purchased a QNAP TVS672XT with Thunderbolt 3 (which I'm currently using) and 10 GboE (which will be utilised once I upgrade my network to 10 GboE in my new place - use google, 10 GboE is really not expensive anymore). I'm using classic HDDs + 2x 1TB NVME read/write SSD cache (in RAID-1 for data protection). Over Thunderbolt 3 I get 663-965 MB/s write and 1500-1624 MB/s read speed - amazing, I'm super happy with this set up!!!! For most SMBs and private users 1TB cache should be more than enough?! So why care for all drives to be SSD at this point?
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p1esk - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
I’d be interested in ssd only nas (nvme) with 10g ethernet port - from qnap or synology.p1esk - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
2 or 4 drives. I’d pay up to $400 for it.TomaBgd - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
There is a product like that, but not for $400. It's $500 with no disks.QNAP TBS-453DX
https://www.amazon.com/QNAP-TBS-453DX-4G-US-Quad-C...
jeremyshaw - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
It's also a Celeron junker, so SATA-only.tokyojerry - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
I also wanted a similar type of device like this with SSD to use as DAS (for NLE video) and NAS. The let down for me was port design. QNAP designs four USB-A ports on the back whereas they could easily have designed it with USB-C ports more appropriate to an M.2, NVMe-based NAS design.UpSpin - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
QNAP TS-332X. 3 3.5" SATA slots and 3 M.2 SATA slots, equip everything with 2TB SATA3 drives, and you get 6Gb/s. Why bother about the last 4Gb/s, which are most probably unrealistic to get in most scenarios.You wrote in a later post, that you generat lots of data, so it might be better to have plenty of data with 6Gb/s instead of little to nothing with 10Gb/s.
p1esk - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
Why would I go with TS-332X when TBS-453DX provides pretty much all I asked for just $80 more? 4 slots instead of 3 (great for RAID5), quiet (hopefully), small, and 10GbE is nice because I'm thinking about getting a beefy video editing desktop PC which will have a 10GbE port.UpSpin - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
because the TS-332X supports 6 SATA SSDs and I thought that you need both capacity and transfer speed.imaheadcase - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
You can use SSD only in current NAS if wanted to. Just kinda silly to because SSD is still limited by network you are connected to. Zero anything you store is going to see a difference.Zan Lynx - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
That would be why the 10g Ethernet port. More speed. Should be able to do a gigabyte per second.imaheadcase - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Only for transfers, which at home would be silly anyways because it is so fast. Unless you play on transfer of bluray rips constantly no point in it. Nothing you store now can't stream on regular 1gig network.Dug - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
That's ridiculous. Ever heard of backing up TB's of steam library. Or TB's of photos and videos. Or running VM's. Or countless other things requiring high bandwidth and speed.jabber - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Ever thought of making an effort NOT to have TBs of games, video and photos?What a huge digital millstone round your neck. I bet 80% of it is junk/porn/torrents too.
p1esk - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
I make lots of videos with my iPhone, so it gets full every 2-3 months (256GB model). And I love watching those videos. So I have no idea what you mean by "digital millstone". I need the space and I need the speed. Currently I use a 6 yo Synology NAS with two WD 6GB green drives, but it's pretty slow and pretty noisy.Reflex - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
Your device can't transfer at 10 GigE, so you really can't use more than gigabit in even the best case scenario. You would be best served by a HDD based model that permits a SSD cache (either SATA or M.2) which would max out what your device can transfer.MadAd - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
comes to a top tech site..suggests we join the luddites..
Im a home user with a mix of data sizes and my 2 disk nas is barely coping so, as anyone looking to upgrade now, why would I bother investing in a 4 bay today which _doesnt_ have a 10GbE route? It would be a waste of money as I expect the NAS chassis would last me for the next 5 years at least and sticking with 1Gb would handcuff me to 125MB/s max.
Since most terminals today have at least a cheap sata ssd it would be nice to have that as a baseline write speed around a home network at least as fast as sata 3 write speeds (~4GbE) and not be handcuffed to the write speed of a spinning mechanical HDD (~1GbE) when thats really going to be the doman of NAS going forward (and even there caching SSDs are becoming the norm).
So going forward why wouldnt anyone, not just professionals, spec for 10GbE where possible? NAS vendors get it, 10GbE cards are dropping below 100 now, other tech such as 2.5GbE USB dongles are starting to appear, all were waiting for is a line of (relatively) inexpensive consumer level 10GbE home switches and the market is set.
Kakti - Wednesday, January 15, 2020 - link
Gigabit ethernet gives you roughly 120 megs/sec10 Gigabit ethernet gives you approximately 1.2 gigs/sec
SATA3 tops out at roughly 550 megs/sec
Even with a SATA limited device, you'd have a massive benefit from having 10GigE vs 1GigE - from 120mb/sec to 550mb/sec.
With NVME we'll be capped even at 10GigE, but Wifi6 is just around the corner. For use cases like a small office with some users hardwired and some on laptops, it'd be nice to have the hardwire maxing out the 10GigE and Wifi6 sending out another couple hundred megs.
jabber - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
"I make lots of videos with my iPhone"Ahhh yes so mostly junk then. Gonna be hilarious when folks reach the age of 55 and they have to spend thousands on power bills and cooling to keep their photo/data collection.
"Gonna have to switch off Grandad's data farm now kids!" Yuk!
bmacsys - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
jabber, why are you so insistent on making yourself look like a moron and a troll rolled into one?bmacsys - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
Is there something wrong with you?Reflex - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
If you are dealing in terabytes and terabytes of data o a regular basis you aren't using SSD's anyway due to cost of storage plus low density. And you really want to be running some form of RAID so you don't lose it all, which again reduces capacity.The systems you want do exist and most of the higher end NAS' products include either 10Gb or a PCIe slot for you to install your own. And enough drive bays with M.2 caching to take advantage of it with SSDs. Not cheap of course, but it's a professional scenario.
p1esk - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
@Reflex: I just ordered TBS-453DX together with four WD Blue M.2 2TB SSDs, which in RAID5 will provide 6TB. It will probably be at least a couple of years to fill it up, and by that time I'll upgrade to 4TB drives (or larger). Regarding 10GbE port - it's more of future proofing the system - I plan to buy a beefy video editing desktop PC soon which will have a 10GbE port, and I will probably buy a small 10GbE switch, and 4 SATA SSDs in RAID5 will most likely be able to saturate 10GbE link.Reflex - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
The key point is 'on a regular basis'. Anything less than a TB of data transfers more than fast enough to a SATA SSD or HDD with a M.2 cache (1TB NVMe drives are cheap). Unless one is routinely syncing multiple TB's with the NAS, which if your total capacity is 6TB and it will take 'years' to fill you aren't, this is overkill. Even in a scenario where you are working actively with terabytes of data on the fly rather than simply working on it locally and then syncing or uploading to the NAS, you are better off with a TB enclosure than an ethernet NAS.My NAS currently has 32TB, I sync a ton of media to it and with a 1TB M.2 it's plenty fast enough, after all there are multiple limiters involved that aren't the network link both on the host and the clients.
I'm glad that you were able to buy the specifications you liked, however. My guess is in a couple years you realize you massively overspent for future proofing when you'd have been better off buying what you needed today and upgrading when your real world use cases justified it.
ABR - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Problem is most of their lineups are in the stone age with 3.5" bays, big fans, and bulky form factors. The product TomaBgd pointed out is a rare bird, and they do charge for that rarity.tokyojerry - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Except that QNAP designed it with USB-A ports versus USB-C ports which doesn't make much sense for a device that is an M.2 NVMe SSD-based NASlilkwarrior - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Yeah, that didn't make any sense. USB4 USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 should be the only USB anything 2020 NAS should have.imaheadcase - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
I would argue that a NAS doesn't need any of those. Most people have them out of hands reach anyways, pretty much dumb devices. Its why they have remote UI.Reflex - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
Yes, a NAS is rarely directly interacted with, and most of the devices that get plugged into the USB ports are things like a UPS for power stability, a printer for the print server and sometimes a WiFi dongle. These are not devices that need more than USB3.tokyojerry - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
... unless you use it locally as DAS with USB-C quick access. (Ref TS-653B)schujj07 - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
If you want a NAS with SSD storage, you will want more than 10GbE. Minimum I would want would be dual 25GbE ports to be able to take advantage of the SSD. Reason for that is a 10 disk RAID50 array of 3.5" disks can flood a 10GbE link with ease on sequential writes.plopke - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
No refresh of synology routers to wifi 6? Or are they already getting out of that business?patel21 - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
Why couldn't they use ryzen chips. I don't mind if they use last gen or the embedded onesPeachNCream - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
Would it really matter either way? We are talking about NAS boxes so as long as the CPU isn't a bottleneck, the branding shouldn't be overly important.Reflex - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
QNAP does have Ryzen based products: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11523/qnap-launches...Also, it matters because for many of us these are also home servers. I run a number of services both virtualized and in containers on mine.
PeachNCream - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Its still true that as long as the CPU is not a bottleneck, branding shouldn't be that important. Costs could be a factor as well, but brand agnostic buyers in many merchandise categories usually realize the best savings and most benefits for their expenditures.Reflex - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Sure, if you aren't running a demanding app on your NAS the CPU does not matter much. But keep in mind a 'demanding app' can be as simple as Plex, which is supported on both and due to transcoding can hammer a CPU.I think it's fair to ask where is Ryzen, and the response implying that it does not matter is incorrect. For those looking at full on Core based NAS units there is a use case, and once you go there asking for the more performant and less power hungry Ryzen variant is a reasonable request.
milkywayer - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Of course it matters when you run a plex server. It could mean anywhere from 20 to 40% more cores or processing power for the same cost going from Intel to ryzen.Reflex - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
Plus the QNAP models with Core or Ryzen CPU's are physically upgradeable, which is really ice given AMD's forward socket compatibility.imaheadcase - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
I don't agree with the whole "cloud" making NAS less appealing. Most people who get a NAS are content creators/media people in general. I don't think i know anyone who works with video/photos that just relies solos on cloud for storage.Devices>NAS>cloud is pretty much what most do. Given that Synology for example has all the cloud build in for auto upload is perfect.
Also, while internet is a lot better than years past, not having a internet connection for some reason beyond control you will wish you had hard backups.
ganeshts - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
"Content creators/media people" are essentially small businesses.There used to be a big market for personal media storage and local backups - this is when multiple vendors had units in the market with the standard Twonky Media Server and uPnP support. We don't see any vendors attempting that sort of product anymore because there is no market for that - closest is the WD My Cloud Home / Duo with its My Cloud OS 3.0 - even that continues to exist because WD can put in their own Red drives and release a new SKU with higher capacity on a regular basis.
That said, overall I echo your sentiments that this particular market segment must not die down. But, practically speaking, people in that segment will just have to migrate to a SMB-focused NAS unit that will have more features than necessary (and that will obviously cost extra)
Threska - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Well not just audio/video but even books, and let's not forget the cloud charges quite a bit for their storage, never mind most people are on asymmetrical connections. Ransomware alone provides an incentive for local backups.Reflex - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
To be fair, I could pay for many years of cloud storage for what I paid for my NAS + storage, I put it together because I wanted to do more but I don't pretend its cheaper than just buying cloud storage, it isn't.Also a home NAS is not a defense against ransomware, the backed up data will also be encrypted, and at least a cloud storage provider may detect this or offer versioning to roll back to safety.
wr3zzz - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
How are the Realtek ARM chips? Qnap has a China only 4-bay model that is cheaper than 2-bay using Intel chips.DanNeely - Friday, January 10, 2020 - link
What does Synology have to go up against QNAPs TS-251D as a 2bay NBASE-T capable models.Lord of the Bored - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Every year, i feel more and more like the proper NAS solution is to grab an old case* and motherboard, and just build your own.*One of those old Antec or Cooler Master cases that used to be ubiquitous, with the mesh front and drive cages stacked floor to ceiling. From back when # of disks in your RAID was a key enthusiast metric instead of # of lumens in your lighting.
ulurulu - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
For the DIYer and hobbyist sure. It takes no small amount of time to set up, troubleshoot, and support your own solution. For the content creators/media users I'm sure they have more important things to do.Power efficiency matters as 10W running 24x7x365 is an additional $10-$20 of annual cost. The vendor solutions come out ahead after only a few years in addition to coming with both software and hardware support.
With that said I roll my own but I'm a hobbyist.
Beany2013 - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
I could build a NAS that would be cheaper and faster than the Syno NASs I have at home, and at work.However, I already have plenty of stuff to support, so having something that works out of the box and has perfectly acceptable performance and is easy to use (and has a warranty...) is definitely of more value to me....I do enough work *at work*, I don't need to do more at home :-)
imaheadcase - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
Remember Windows Home Server? It was awesome till MS abandoned it. BUT a developer actually made software that mimics it. Its is called Stablebit DrivePool . Basically build a PC, thrown in all the drives you want, install software, makes it all one huge drive. . Has everything you want, balancing, file protection, mirroring, cloud, even has a separate drive monitoring software that sends you alerts with drive problems if happens.Dug - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
There's several free OS's specifically aimed for NAS users that already do that. Also with choice of formatting, replication, and redundancy.bill.rookard - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
That's what I did for the longest time. Then I just went out and bought a reconditioned server (dual Xeons with 12c/24t) and dual redundant hotswappable PSUs.. Loaded it up with 32GB of DDR3 (and room for lots more), 3 & 4TB enterprise drives from HGST and Seagate and it runs CentOS with ZFS. Been absolutely solid and transcodes at 200+ fps. Cost (not including the drives) was about $250.00Reflex - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
When I got rid of my server like that a few years ago and replaced it with my high end QNAP NAS, my power bill (plus noise in the house) went down enough to pay the price difference in about two years. Also much less management headache.HollyDOL - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
I've placed my bet on Helios64 yesterday, fingers crossed it proves to be a good choice.Valantar - Saturday, January 11, 2020 - link
The problem with the consumer NAS market is that they've done a very poor job marketing a product that has never reached commodity pricing, meaning that the only people buying them have been those already interested on their own and willing to pay for the privilege of not having a product pitched to them. When even Atom-based 4-bay units easily exceed $400 without drives anyone should be able to understand how the average user would rather pay for something simpler (online backup, external storage) or use a convenient free solution.I do all media storage on my HTPC, and will be spinning that out into a separate HTPC and DIY NAS for the next upgrade cycle. The price alone has been enough to make me dismiss any notion of buying a NAS. Sure, I'll need to learn how to set up FreeNAS or a similar OS, but I'll get a far more flexible, powerful and fully featured product for a far lower price. I completely understand that the vat majority of people are neither willing nor able to do this, but as a PC enthusiast already quite frankly I don't see this as much more of a commitment than buying an off-the-shelf NAS - and for the average user I can't imagine buying a NAS feels any less daunting than building one.
PaulHoule - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
The lesson of history is that people don't learn from history.In the 1990s, Intel crushed the competition in medium-to-high performance processors. In terms of price-performance nobody could compete so companies that made RISC workstations such as Sun, SGI and IBM were pushed out of the market.
Circa 2000 NAS and router devices tried to save money on chips by using MIPS and other low-performance and even lower performance-price ratio products. I saw so many devices that struggled to serve files over SMB in that time frame, took forever to boot, etc. You might save 10% on the BoM using that kind of chip, but then take a 10x cut in performance, and then the vendor would feel like they have to shortchange you on memory.
Circa 2010 Intel decided it wanted to dominate the market for "low performance but expensive for what you get" just around the time that medium-performance ARM chips became a commodity product that was well priced. Companies like Samsung still work overtime to put junk chips in devices like the SmartThings hub, but "penny wise and pound foolish" is the definition of the modern enterprise.
I got a cheap tower server that was built locally, with a real i5 processor. I know enough not to mess around with Atom or Celeron, you won't really save money but you will get a huge performance loss that just isn't it worth it. (Now American car companies would make bad small cars and change the name every few years... Why doesn't Intel do that? At that point they might fool somebody twice instead of once.)
The specs of my machine are on an entire different level. I think in 2020 a Linux machine with just 1G of RAM is going to struggle to boot, never mind serve files. My server has 32GB, and it has a lot of USB 3 ports that I can use to move content on and off removable drives, mobile devices, etc. My machine has a 1050GTX graphics card so it can transcode video without working a sweat.
What people just don't get today is that people DO NOT experience the mean or median performance, what makes your computer painful to use is the 95-99% percent slowdowns and the answer to that, if you value your time, your frustration, your attention, your blood pressure, etc. is that you need to have more power than strictly necessary. If you try to lowball the specs and do it with non-commodity pricing you are getting the worst of both worlds.
haukionkannel - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
It seem that I have to wait Many year more... an affordable 10Gb 4 to 5 storage nas with One or two slot m2 ssd cache.Most options Are enterprice level devices with more space than I ever need or slow 1Gb or 2.5gb lan speeds...
MadAd - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
> an affordable 10Gb 4 to 5 storage nas with One or two slot m2 ssd cache.For me this is the ideal baseline 4 bay prosumer unit going forward too, but im sure the NAS vendors know this. Dont forget to add on the time lag waiting for a residential 10gbe switch, the home market is still waiting on an affordable consumer unit, and then motherboards need to start offering 5 or 10gbe as standard then we can truly wave bye to 1gbe.
haukionkannel - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
I have allready 10gb motherboard, and 10gb swich are now from $150 to $450 for my needs...Only nas are not there yet, unles i buy 12 bay enterprice nas... I have a lot of files, but no so much and not ready pay $1500+ for that huge box.
Foeketijn - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
No Design wins for AMD then. No Ryzen R1000 or Epyc 3000. Everybody forgot the reliability issues with embedded Apollo Lake processors?evilpaul666 - Sunday, January 12, 2020 - link
Any suggestions for good enclosures to roll your own? 4 drive bays and room for a 280mm radiator would be ideal.rkhalloran - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
I have a two-bay Intel-based Synology NAS which replaced one of their earlier ARM units and has worked well as a media tank. That said, I note that the Twonky Media Server I use there for DLNA has apparently gone under per the Wikipedia article: "Twonky Server was maintained all the time by the former TwonkyVision employees which worked for the German subsidiary Lynx Germany GmbH. Lynx Germany GmbH was shut down 10/2018". I'm unsure if the US division is maintaining it...Gunbuster - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
Any word on the NAS vendors upping their security game? They really fail at taking on the likes of Ring and Netatmo...Yop1403 - Sunday, February 2, 2020 - link
Don't understand why some would like to go for NAS equipped with SSD only at this point - one day SSDs will be cheaper than HDDs but we're not there yet. Currently a set up with HDDs and SDDs as cache makes the most sense for me. This of course has to go in line with a proper network connection (10 GboE or Thunderbolt 3). Synology has announced a DS1620xs mid 2019 but has still not released it so I have finally purchased a QNAP TVS672XT with Thunderbolt 3 (which I'm currently using) and 10 GboE (which will be utilised once I upgrade my network to 10 GboE in my new place - use google, 10 GboE is really not expensive anymore). I'm using classic HDDs + 2x 1TB NVME read/write SSD cache (in RAID-1 for data protection). Over Thunderbolt 3 I get 663-965 MB/s write and 1500-1624 MB/s read speed - amazing, I'm super happy with this set up!!!! For most SMBs and private users 1TB cache should be more than enough?! So why care for all drives to be SSD at this point?