Data Dance

Decentralization was the battle cry of the client-server revolution – away with the mainframe! Now the pendulum has swung back and ended up in the cloud. However, in these times of Amazon, Google, and NSA and of spectacular hacks with millions of stolen records, both private individuals and enterprises are fully aware that private data attracts unwanted attention. Some businesses prefer to keep their data at home. To combine the benefits of a central repository with the advantages of local control, you really need to run your own cloud. Is that possible? The ADMIN magazine team decided to test a few NAS appliances and see how far we could get.

We requested four NAS appliances from four manufacturers (Table 1). All of these products are also suitable for small businesses or larger departments. These products cost less than $1,000, including disks, and all are easy to manage, even without IT personnel.

Table 1

Test Equipment Specifications

	QNAP	Synology	Thecus	Netgear
Model	TS-251	DS-214	N5550	ReadyNAS RN31400
Manufacturer	QNAP Inc.	Synology	Thecus	Netgear
Operating System	QTS 4.1.1 (Linux 3.12.6)	DSM 5.0-4493 Update 5 (Linux 3.2.40)	Thecus OS 5.0 (Linux 3.10.47)	ReadyNAS OS 6.1.9
Price (without disks,EUR incl. VAT)	$350/EUR390	$300/EUR250	$370/EUR430	$600/EUR675
Hardware
Processor	Intel Celeron J1800, 2.41GHz (dual core)	Marvell Armada XP (PJ4Bv7), 1.066GHz (dual core)	Intel Atom D2550, 1.86GHz (dual core)	Intel Atom D2701, 2.13GHz (dual core)
RAM	4GB	0.5GB	2GB	2GB
Network Interface	2x 1Gbit Ethernet	1x 1Gbit Ethernet	2x 1Gbit Ethernet	2x 1Gbit Ethernet
Power Supplies	External, In: 100-240 V/50-60 Hz; Out: 12 V/5 A	External, In: 100-240 V/50-60 Hz; Out: 12 V/6 A	Internal	External, In: 100-240 V/50-60 Hz; Out: 12 V/7 A
Disk Trays	2	2	5	4
OS with Flash	Yes	No	Yes	No
Disk Type	3.5 and 2.5 inch	3.5 and 2.5 inch	3.5 and 2.5 inch	3.5 and 2.5 inch
Raid Level	0/1/JBOD	0/1/JBOD	0/1/5/6/10/JBOD	0/1/5/6/0/JBOD/XRAID 2
Spare Disk	No	No	Yes	Yes
Filesystems (Internal HDs)	ext4	ext4	ext3/ext4/XFS	Btrfs
USB 3.0	2x	2x	1x	2x
USB 2.0	2x	1x	4x	1x
eSATA	No	No	Yes	Yes
HDMI	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
VGA	No	No	Yes	No
LCD Panel	No	No	Yes	Yes
Form Factor	Tower, 68x102x225mm	Tower, 165x108x233mm	Tower, 230x190x240mm	Tower, 223x134x205mm

QNAP

The prize for the best software level (Table 2) goes to the QNAP device. With about 130 internal apps, it has twice as many as direct competitor Synology. More is not always better, and you could argue in individual cases that not all of these small applications are justifiable. The selection, however, is huge; it includes 20 audio, video, and photo servers and applications for recording with surveillance cameras, as well as many backup applications that synchronize with cloud storage such as Amazon S3 and Dropbox.

Additionally, full-blown business applications are offered, such as stores or CRM systems, many CMSs (including Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, etc.), and databases such as PostgreSQL and MongoDB. Various utilities and development tools (Java, Perl, Python, etc.), download managers, educational programs, and communication tools are on board. Almost nothing has been left out, and sometimes you have a choice between two or three varieties.

The hardware is also powerful: It has a fast USB 3.0 interface and significantly more RAM than the competitors; finally, QNAP even gives you a fast processor with its NAS, securing it first place in terms of performance, too. However, good equipment, good features, and performance have their price; in relation to the number of disks, the QNAP is the most expensive device in the test field.

Synology

With about 60 apps, the NAS by Synology is not quite as feature-rich as the QNAP, but it's still solidly equipped. Everything you need is in place. In terms of performance, the appliance can keep up with the field, trailing just behind competitor QNAP in some disciplines and running just ahead in others. Additionally, it is the cheapest device in the test field.

Don't look for an HDMI port, though, which all the other test candidates have (Table 3), and the selection of USB ports is also not very generous. However, the web GUI with its stylish design and ease of use can compensate for gaps in other places.

The Synology and Netgear devices both store the operating system on the data disks, whereas it is preinstalled on safe storage with the QNAP and Thecus. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. Devices with a preinstalled OS are immediately configurable after inserting the disks; users with the other system first need to install the operating system from a local disk or off the Internet. Also, devices with a preinstalled OS are relatively safe from attacks, because the contents in memory cannot be easily overwritten. On the downside, knowledgeable users cannot modify the system easily to suit their own ideas.

Thecus

The Thecus device can offer a net capacity of around 15TB (RAID 5) with 4TB disks, or you can make do with 11TB and treat yourself to a global spare disk. This already makes the Thecus more suited for professional applications, such as central data storage for a small company or large department. Additionally, the NAS is pretty cheap; it only costs a little bit more than the two-disk solution by QNAP (without disks in all cases) despite having five disk trays.

Of course, you can't have everything and a good price. For example, the Atom CPU is not powerful enough to handle multiple parallel tasks, many small files, or many metadata operations, such as occur when you copy directory trees, for example.

However, the device by Thecus need not be modest in terms of its other hardware equipment; on the contrary, an eSATA port or an LCD panel is something that not every device has, and this is the only device to offer VGA output (in addition to HDMI).

The Thecus is the only device that lets the user choose freely between various filesystems for the internal volumes or lock the panels against unauthorized disk removal. Additionally, no other competitor has so many USB ports.