Which 4 Disk NAS to go for?

[Pierre3400]

Hey guys,

I am looking into replacing the backup NAS unit at my office, its a QNAP 2disk, and its at least 6 to 8 years old.

Reason for change is that we will be moving photos and videos away from the in house server and onto the NAS unit (this is purely due to space on server being used too fast), while the server will still be backed up with Veeam, to the Nas unit, and then taking weekly backups of the Nas unit onto an external disk, this is for fire safety/insurance reasons.

Personally I run a Netgear ReadyNAS 104 RN10400, which seems to be out of production by now, but handles my files just fine, but i may need a little more power in the office, but we are talking a max of 4 users at a time accessing it, mainly it would be max 2 at a time daily.

What would people recommend. Not home build solutions wanted, i know its easy, but its not required.

A decent pace 4 Disk NAS unit, what can you point me to?

 

[Mjolnir]

What kind of price range?

The DS415+ from Synology has been one of the most popular NAS units at my old work (online tech retailer). If I had the cash spare this is what I'd personally be grabbing. Otherwise the QNAP TS-451+

Noting the DS415+ seems to be phasing out, so there's the DS416 as well?

 

[Pierre3400]

Price range isnt a big issue in this case, I would also like to know more about ram on the NAS, how i may or may not need.

 

[Mjolnir]

The QNAP TS-451+ comes in different variants. I believe comes in 2GB, 8GB variants. I don't realistically believe you'd need more than 2GB for general use with primarily 2 users at once accessing it.

Generally I find synology units come with slightly less RAM, whether it's a testament to more optimised hardware, I'm not sure, but I did find that general consumers (as a trend) went for Synology, and more business-oriented users did go for the QNAP systems. The TS-451+ is also relatively recent (within the last year or so). I also believe you can easily upgrade the RAM yourself at a later date should you so desire. (Based on my experience, Kingston DDR3L 1.35v SODIMM worked fine in QNAP units to replace the RAM, making the 8GB variant of the QNAP somewhat 'overpriced' by comparison).

 

[Pinky]

Drobo?

 

[JrClocker]

I have a QNAP TS-453A.

What I like the most about it is that it has 4 gigabit Ethernet ports that you can setup in parallel mode (forgot the official term).

I have the NAS setup in RAID 10 for speed purposes.

Basically, I can have 4 PCs writing or reading from the NAS at the same time, and each PC will max out it's gigabit Ethernet port. The only time the speed slows down some is when the write is many smaller files versus large ones...but that's the case for any drive.

As an extra bonus, the TS-453A has enough horsepower to run a VM in addition to the main NAS OS (if you have enough memory in it.) I don't use this feature heavily, but I have an Ubuntu VM setup.