"NAS"'s suck in general, their just underpowered Atom CPU's running a small Linux distro from flash memory. Their using Linux Volume manager for the HDD's, its basically fake raid on an extremely weak CPU.[/QUOTE]
Actuall, Atom-based NASes are actually quite good when it comes to network performance. They're the top performers of SmallNetBuilder's NAS Charts (take a look
here). I wasn't referring to those, which are too big and expensive to compare with the likes of single-bay NASes the article refers to.
I was referring to the ARM or MIPS-based 1 or 2-bay NASes. Those do very much suck... Which is why I'd like to see something similar to the RaspberryPi appear on the NAS arena: a dedicated storage processor with enough grunt to move data around at SATA speeds, real Gigabit Ethernet and a general-purpose CPU with just enough power to serve the Linux front-end. Those would be great cheap 1 or 2-bay NASes...
kclee01 :
If you want a true network file server (NAS is just a marketing term for a dedicated network file server) then you should look into something mini-itx from Via or AMD.
Preaching to the choir, here. I myself have built a few NASes out of regular hardware, though I usually go for bigger solutions, to handle more HDDs than you can find on normal consumer-grade machines: my current NAS is a WHS box with 4 drives, with an upgrade to 8 imminent.
VIA isn't much more powerful than Atom, from what I've read, though. Anything less than an E350, undervolted Athlon or Celeron is kind of bad if you want more than two drives and also want to be able to do other stuff with the thing (like webserver, torrent daemon, dnla, etc.).
Anyway, I digress. In short, 1 and 2-bay NASes are very limited, this one might be better because it will use the host's CPU grunt. However, I'm still on the fence, because it seems a USBoE implementation, which would mean you'd be limited to 35MBps speeds... Not great...
Has anyone caught a link to a review, perchance?
Cheers.
Miguel