Which 4-bay NAS is better?


Best NAS  

4 members have voted

  1. 1. Which 4-bay NAS is the best for the $?

    • Netgear ReadyNAS 104
    • ZyXEL NAS540
      0
    • Thecus N4310
      0
    • Synology DS414slim


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Hello Everyone!

 

I wanted to ask you lovely neowinians for a quick "buyer's guide", which of these NAS is the better for the buck. I'm in the need for a 4 bay NAS.

 

250$ - Netgear ReadyNAS 104 RN10400-100EUS - Link

As far as I found out, ReadyNAS is pretty advanced OS, but lately it's lacking support and it's outdated a bit. Not sure if this is true.

 

250$ - ZyXEL NAS540 - Link

All round very good NAS, with a limited OS, but does the everyday job very nicely.

 

290$ - THECUS N4310 - Link

Seems to be a very professional NAS, hardware seems to be an older one though.

 

300$ - SYNOLOGY DiskStation DS414slim - Link

Don't know much about synology.

 

So, out of these, which one is the best for $.... at this very moment, I'm kinda favoring ReadyNAS.

Thanks in advance,

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Personally I think Synologys are great, you pay a little extra but they have much more features. Qnaps also seem to be very nice little units.

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What exactly are you looking to accomplish - you want just a point and click hey my disks are shared or are you looking to get more out of the hardware/OS?

 

For example I do believe atleast in the UK you can pick up a HP microsever gen8 for a song

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/517760-hp-proliant-gen8-g1610t-microserver-712317-421

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I recently bought a Synology DS415+ and its amazing (Running 4 Western Digital Red 4TB Drives in it)

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What exactly are you looking to accomplish - you want just a point and click hey my disks are shared or are you looking to get more out of the hardware/OS?

 

For example I do believe atleast in the UK you can pick up a HP microsever gen8 for a song

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/517760-hp-proliant-gen8-g1610t-microserver-712317-421

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Another vote for Synology. Use them at a lot of client sites and they've always worked great. They are a bit more but the features and rock solid stability seems to be worth it.

 

We do IT support for 40 some companies and at this point we pretty much only use QNAP or Synology.

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Yeah the microservers normally need an upgrade in memory to make them usable for say esxi of anything more than couple of VMs - I run an older N40L with 8GB ram and added nics, and running currently 7 vms 24/7/365 without any issues.

 

One of the vms is my nas, this way you can run pretty much anything you want vs being limited to what the native OS on the device can or can not do..  Much better option of you ask me - unless all your after is a set it and forget NAS..

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Oh, man. You really showed me the way. This machine is for 270$ in the cheapest store nearby, so it's like almost the same price as a NAS, but to have so many VMs RAMs and CPU upgrade is the major portion of the costs. The stock Intel

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Currently my nas vs is running 2012r2 server - its the storage vm in the pic below, using https://stablebit.com/DrivePool for disk pool because to be honest it blows away the built in stuff ms has..  But sure you could use whatever os you wanted freenas, nas4free, or any linux distro you want with samba - or windows 7 even.  Which is what I use to run until I got a copy of 2k12 for free, etc..

 

Yeah esxi is FREE.. you can run as many vms as you hardware will support, etc..

 

post-14624-0-43982100-1432773427.png

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Currently my nas vs is running 2012r2 server - its the storage vm in the pic below, using https://stablebit.com/DrivePool for disk pool because to be honest it blows away the built in stuff ms has..  But sure you could use whatever os you wanted freenas, nas4free, or any linux distro you want with samba - or windows 7 even.  Which is what I use to run until I got a copy of 2k12 for free, etc..

 

Yeah esxi is FREE.. you can run as many vms as you hardware will support, etc..

 

attachicon.gifesxisetup.png

 

Well, in this chase, I could actually fire up my old PC hardware (Intel G41M + Core 2 Q6600), which according to ARK does support VM-x, didn't get all the "fancy" technology names, for example compared to  Intel

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esxi has been free for as long as I can remember - they always have had free versions even back in server 1 and 2, etc..

 

You can not do all the fancy stuff like vmotion, etc with free..  But its always been free that I can remember for the basic stuff.

 

Why would you want/need raid?  Other than maybe if you wanted a really screaming datastore on raid 0 ssd drives or something..  But my vms boot up in seconds off my normal ssd disk as my datastore.

 

what do you want to do with android/ios apps?  You want to manage your esxi host from your phone?

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