Do you have any information on the underlying filesystem?
As nice as having prebuilt NASes are, IMO they just don't offer enough to sway me away from a custom ZFS-based box (NAS4Free on an Avoton/Rangeley SoC comes the closest in my experience).
You can roll your own definitely [ I have an upcoming article too :) ], but this target market - SMB / SOHO - needs something working right out of the box, need someone to turn to / call a support line if something strange starts happening with the system.
> You can roll your own definitely [ I have an upcoming article too :) ]
Glad to hear it. May I make a suggestion for that? I hope it is not too much of an imposition. This is something which was already emailed to Anand about a couple of weeks ago.
You can install any of these 3 to test with: NAS4Free, FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault. But please please please can we have a direct (NAS-oriented) performance comparison between these following 2 CPUs ?
Reasons: * The TDP of i3 is often lower then intel adverdise, so being 'similar enough TDP to the Avoton. * The price of CPU + motherboard is nearly the same. * One is 4 thread, the other 8 core, they are a good match in performance. * The i3 has 'for free' HD 4600 iGPU with quicksync. Which can be useful (in future) for Plex media transcoding. * Both of these CPU support ECC for ZFS, if partnered with a suitable Supermicro or AsRock 'server' motherboard. Including the IPMI etc.
The Avoton/Rageley platform has a few benefits over the normal i3 platform though: integrated 4x1Gbit (or 4x2.5Gbit, never seen that deployed) MACs, motherboards designed with a bunch of SATA ports on board and a truly fanless design.
Not safe enough for me: I have seen a brand new drive chomp the filetable and break stuff.
If an SMB/SOHO NAS would ship with ZFS RAIDZ1/2, it would completely change the market for me, from "little unreliable toys" as I call 'em to being something I can have faith in.
Also, no matter how good the support is, that's no help when your usual RAID5/6 fails horribly during rebuild due to uncaught UREs, or if say cryptolocker/cryptowall comes in and encrypts all your data. ZFS fights UREs by regularly verifying the drives, and cryptolocker/cryptowall can be mitigated very well using a good snapshotting routine.
yeah i can relate... anything below zfs (or any other filesystem doing block checksumming (& recovery in raid)) is just not state of the art. sadly only few people know that ~$1200 buys you a completely silent 16 bay diskless zfs ecc-enabled server... sure it's a steep buy-in, but then you get enterprise only components (supermicro/lsi)
On newegg.ca, I can pick up the Synology DS214se (169.99) and two Seagate 4TB NAS 3.5" drives (174.99 each) for 519.97, so not huge savings when you add drives, but it should be a faster machine. As the graph shows, the real competition to Synology is the DS213j.
I dont know what it is but ive always been a sucker for seagate. I've always prefered them over any other hard drive company. i think ill get this for my business. :)
well i have to hand it to wd, for their WD MyBook Live Duo is awsome at it's price... for only $100 more i got a complete 2-bay nas that works really well. it has *official* full root ssh access to the debian it's running. BUT compared to a fileserver with an sandy bridge i3, agonizingly SLOW. (even for very low i/o stuff) plus by now it has probably more security holes than swiss cheese (unpatched debian lenny from ~2011)... plus while using linux md raid & ext4, the filesystem requires a custom kernel to be mounted... so recovery is still a pain in the a** my point: hardware seems fine, but i fear seagate provides the same crappy software
"We should get BETTER PERFORMANCE and lower power consumption with the NAS Pro as compared to the competition". Better performance? What about the QNAP TS-x51 NAS Series? How does Seagate's 1.7Ghz Rangeley Atom C2338 compare to QNAP's 2.41GHz Bay Trail-D Celeron J1800?
TS-x51 and the Seagate NAS / NAS Pro target completely different markets.
TS-x51 is for home and power users. Targets media enthusiasts.
Avoton / Rangeley is for SMB / performance oriented servers and data storage systems.
Just check number of in-built PCIe lanes / SATA ports in the Avoton and Rangeley parts. Clock for clock, yes, the J1800 is better, but the speed at which the peripherals connect to the main SoC / configuration of connections probably makes the Avoton / Rangeley SoCs better.
I will try to get in a 4-bay NAS Pro for evaluation and then you will have benchmarks for the TS-451 and the Seagate NAS.
The performance of prosumer / SMB NAS boxes tends to collapse when using encrypted folders / volumes. It would be quite interesting to know whether Seagate uses the AES-NI capabilities of the cpu and how much of a difference this will make.
I have to admit I'm still kind of baffled by NAS stuff. Have wanted something like this since Windows Home Server, but...still confused. I just want something to copy files to for a backup, that 's RAIDed in some meaningful way, and hopefully is accessible even if the device itself dies (I'd prefer these were running Windows and NTFS...)
Regarding "apps" and whatnot, zero interest. I'm a home user for this stuff but I just want secure storage on my network and that's it...
So what happens now with LaCie ? I have a 5Big NAS Pro and I am seriously underwhelmed. LaCie just doesn't have the same kind of community that Synology or QNAP has. The not-so-quiet 5Big actually overheated in a room when the temp went to 86F and marked a disk as 'bad'. Rebuilding the array failed three times until I deselected the spin down options for the HDDs.
If the Seagate NAS builds on top of NAS OS3 and makes it better, along with a more vibrant community - then great, because I'd then buy the 6 bay unit.
But it could also mean that LaCie NAS boxes don't get any updates and slowly fade away ...
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ZeDestructor - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
Do you have any information on the underlying filesystem?As nice as having prebuilt NASes are, IMO they just don't offer enough to sway me away from a custom ZFS-based box (NAS4Free on an Avoton/Rangeley SoC comes the closest in my experience).
SirMaster - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
Yeah, this is like the main thing I would be concerned about in a NAS. Whats the RAID system they are using?takeshi7 - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
I'm pretty sure you can set up any RAID system you want. Or at least some combination of 0/1/5/ and/or 6.ganeshts - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
EXT4 file system.You can roll your own definitely [ I have an upcoming article too :) ], but this target market - SMB / SOHO - needs something working right out of the box, need someone to turn to / call a support line if something strange starts happening with the system.
anandtech_user01 - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
> You can roll your own definitely [ I have an upcoming article too :) ]Glad to hear it. May I make a suggestion for that? I hope it is not too much of an imposition. This is something which was already emailed to Anand about a couple of weeks ago.
You can install any of these 3 to test with: NAS4Free, FreeNAS or OpenMediaVault. But please please please can we have a direct (NAS-oriented) performance comparison between these following 2 CPUs ?
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/110/Intel_Atom_C2...
Reasons:
* The TDP of i3 is often lower then intel adverdise, so being 'similar enough TDP to the Avoton.
* The price of CPU + motherboard is nearly the same.
* One is 4 thread, the other 8 core, they are a good match in performance.
* The i3 has 'for free' HD 4600 iGPU with quicksync. Which can be useful (in future) for Plex media transcoding.
* Both of these CPU support ECC for ZFS, if partnered with a suitable Supermicro or AsRock 'server' motherboard. Including the IPMI etc.
Many thanks.
ZeDestructor - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
The Avoton/Rageley platform has a few benefits over the normal i3 platform though: integrated 4x1Gbit (or 4x2.5Gbit, never seen that deployed) MACs, motherboards designed with a bunch of SATA ports on board and a truly fanless design.ZeDestructor - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
Not safe enough for me: I have seen a brand new drive chomp the filetable and break stuff.If an SMB/SOHO NAS would ship with ZFS RAIDZ1/2, it would completely change the market for me, from "little unreliable toys" as I call 'em to being something I can have faith in.
ZeDestructor - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
Also, no matter how good the support is, that's no help when your usual RAID5/6 fails horribly during rebuild due to uncaught UREs, or if say cryptolocker/cryptowall comes in and encrypts all your data. ZFS fights UREs by regularly verifying the drives, and cryptolocker/cryptowall can be mitigated very well using a good snapshotting routine.bernstein - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
yeah i can relate... anything below zfs (or any other filesystem doing block checksumming (& recovery in raid)) is just not state of the art.sadly only few people know that ~$1200 buys you a completely silent 16 bay diskless zfs ecc-enabled server... sure it's a steep buy-in, but then you get enterprise only components (supermicro/lsi)
JimmaDaRustla - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
Holy shit, 2 bay NAS for 169 with a 1.2ghz, that should blow the Synology 214se out of the water?JimmaDaRustla - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
On newegg.ca, I can pick up the Synology DS214se (169.99) and two Seagate 4TB NAS 3.5" drives (174.99 each) for 519.97, so not huge savings when you add drives, but it should be a faster machine. As the graph shows, the real competition to Synology is the DS213j.austinsguitar - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
I dont know what it is but ive always been a sucker for seagate. I've always prefered them over any other hard drive company. i think ill get this for my business. :)bernstein - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
well i have to hand it to wd, for their WD MyBook Live Duo is awsome at it's price... for only $100 more i got a complete 2-bay nas that works really well. it has *official* full root ssh access to the debian it's running.BUT compared to a fileserver with an sandy bridge i3, agonizingly SLOW. (even for very low i/o stuff) plus by now it has probably more security holes than swiss cheese (unpatched debian lenny from ~2011)... plus while using linux md raid & ext4, the filesystem requires a custom kernel to be mounted... so recovery is still a pain in the a**
my point:
hardware seems fine, but i fear seagate provides the same crappy software
Mike1111 - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
"We should get BETTER PERFORMANCE and lower power consumption with the NAS Pro as compared to the competition".Better performance? What about the QNAP TS-x51 NAS Series? How does Seagate's 1.7Ghz Rangeley Atom C2338 compare to QNAP's 2.41GHz Bay Trail-D Celeron J1800?
ganeshts - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
TS-x51 and the Seagate NAS / NAS Pro target completely different markets.TS-x51 is for home and power users. Targets media enthusiasts.
Avoton / Rangeley is for SMB / performance oriented servers and data storage systems.
Just check number of in-built PCIe lanes / SATA ports in the Avoton and Rangeley parts. Clock for clock, yes, the J1800 is better, but the speed at which the peripherals connect to the main SoC / configuration of connections probably makes the Avoton / Rangeley SoCs better.
I will try to get in a 4-bay NAS Pro for evaluation and then you will have benchmarks for the TS-451 and the Seagate NAS.
slowfox - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
The performance of prosumer / SMB NAS boxes tends to collapse when using encrypted folders / volumes. It would be quite interesting to know whether Seagate uses the AES-NI capabilities of the cpu and how much of a difference this will make.Filiprino - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
RAID5 write hole... if there's no ZFS then there's no match.Wolfpup - Thursday, July 17, 2014 - link
I have to admit I'm still kind of baffled by NAS stuff. Have wanted something like this since Windows Home Server, but...still confused. I just want something to copy files to for a backup, that 's RAIDed in some meaningful way, and hopefully is accessible even if the device itself dies (I'd prefer these were running Windows and NTFS...)Regarding "apps" and whatnot, zero interest. I'm a home user for this stuff but I just want secure storage on my network and that's it...
harshw - Friday, July 18, 2014 - link
So what happens now with LaCie ? I have a 5Big NAS Pro and I am seriously underwhelmed. LaCie just doesn't have the same kind of community that Synology or QNAP has. The not-so-quiet 5Big actually overheated in a room when the temp went to 86F and marked a disk as 'bad'. Rebuilding the array failed three times until I deselected the spin down options for the HDDs.If the Seagate NAS builds on top of NAS OS3 and makes it better, along with a more vibrant community - then great, because I'd then buy the 6 bay unit.
But it could also mean that LaCie NAS boxes don't get any updates and slowly fade away ...