SOHO server

I recently bought a small NAS for home, to stuff it with media, backup, and the content of the dvds lying around home. My plan was to rip open the external hds I have and put them into the NAS.

I considered

  • Drobo for 380€: no ethernet port but smart use of different size hard disks, which is important for my scenario
  • Promise NS4300N for 300€: cheap
  • Diskstation DS409 for 420€: very good performance
  • QNAP ts-410 for 400€: very good performance

Obviously, I bought a different one: the Synology DS410j for 300€ which as cheap as the others but is newer and has the other stuff I’m interested like streaming to the PS3 and it can use both 3.5 and 2.5 SATA drives (and the DS409 and the QNAP can also do that). By chance, a new beta firmware just came out which introduces a smart RAID system, a la Drobo!

It’s been only a few weeks but I really like it…


geeky