Which NAS?

[african_leopard]

Hello

So....this is my first foray into buying a NAS. I have been doing a bunch of research, and I think these two fit my requirements [read budget] - QNAP TS212 and Synology DS212j - both 1.2 processor. They currently cost exactly the same price, and I am struggling to determine which is better for me.

Requirements
1. Streaming media - at the moment only music, but I do have all the toys like Wii, XBOX360 and PS3 and a HD 1080p TV - so video streaming may be an option later
2. I have 2 PCs and 2 iPhones [with a laptop and/or tablet in the near future]
3. Back up

My understanding is that running in RAID 1 will give me a back up - but reading elsewhere this is actually just a redundancy disk and I would still need to back up my data. If that is true, then would a 1 bay suffice? The following are all priced similarly QNAP TS-112-US [1.2 cpu] and Synology DS112j [1.0 cpu]. This one has a 1.6 processor QNAP TS-119P+-US and is priced the same as the 2-bays above - it also has the most memory at 516 MB.

Comments? Advise?

Thanks for any feedback.

 

[RealBeast]

Do not rely on RAID of any kind for backup, it is simply fault tolerant storage.

Buy a larger device than you need now, needs always grow.

Both QNAP and Synology make excellent products. I would not worry about the processor though if you are not doing RAID 5 or 6 where parity calculations are needed.