Monster900
Established Member
- Joined
- Dec 30, 2011
- Messages
- 410
- Reaction score
- 103
- Points
- 83
I usually frequent the satellite TV forum on this site and this is my first post in this forum. There do seem to be a lot of knowledgeable people here giving sound advice and information which is good to see because I'm a bit of a novice with networking.
I have had, for many years, a Zyxel NSA310 NAS which has proved a slow but reliable workhorse as both a NAS and media server. My wife and I have been using this to store more and more data which is important to us so that it can be accessed from PCs dotted around the house. As a result of this I have been getting slightly worried that a single disk NAS is not a very secure way to store such data and so I resolved to move to a two bay NAS with RAID 1 redundancy and also to move to a NAS / media server which could do transcoding if necessary.
I started out by looking at products from Synology and QNAP and was shocked to see prices of around £230-£400 for what, in PC terms, would be pretty basic hardware. A few years ago I built a quad core, low power, small form factor, Windows 10 Pro PC based on the AM1 platform with an AMD 5350 quad core, 2 GHz processor and small SSD. It cost £205 pounds to build using all new parts. The slight cheat here is that I did have a Windows 10 Pro licence spare. I reckon I could build a similarly specced machine for much the same money today but I may have to use a Linux based OS to stay within budget (as Synology and QNAP do) . The equivalent hardware spec. NAS from Synology or QNAP would be ~£400.
I have now removed the 4TB WD Red drive from the Zyxel and installed it in the PC, added another 4TB drive and mirrored them in Win 10, copied the data back onto the mirrored drives, set up the appropriate shared folders, and enabled Windows 10 DLNA function. It now seems to operate exactly as a NAS / media server should and functionally mimics the Zyxel only much faster. As I understand it, if I need a more sophisticated media server function I can add Plex, Universal Media Server or Kodi, but I don't know much about this. The upside is I can still use this as a PC to surf the internet, pick up email, stream TV, play music etc. as well as it functioning as a NAS/media server on the network. The only problem that I can see is that Windows 10 isn't a particularly stable platform, with Microsoft making a concerted effort to break it every six months or so with their 'features' updates.
So am I missing something here? What is it that makes QNAP and Synology NAS/media servers worth nearly twice as much as the equivalent PC?
I have had, for many years, a Zyxel NSA310 NAS which has proved a slow but reliable workhorse as both a NAS and media server. My wife and I have been using this to store more and more data which is important to us so that it can be accessed from PCs dotted around the house. As a result of this I have been getting slightly worried that a single disk NAS is not a very secure way to store such data and so I resolved to move to a two bay NAS with RAID 1 redundancy and also to move to a NAS / media server which could do transcoding if necessary.
I started out by looking at products from Synology and QNAP and was shocked to see prices of around £230-£400 for what, in PC terms, would be pretty basic hardware. A few years ago I built a quad core, low power, small form factor, Windows 10 Pro PC based on the AM1 platform with an AMD 5350 quad core, 2 GHz processor and small SSD. It cost £205 pounds to build using all new parts. The slight cheat here is that I did have a Windows 10 Pro licence spare. I reckon I could build a similarly specced machine for much the same money today but I may have to use a Linux based OS to stay within budget (as Synology and QNAP do) . The equivalent hardware spec. NAS from Synology or QNAP would be ~£400.
I have now removed the 4TB WD Red drive from the Zyxel and installed it in the PC, added another 4TB drive and mirrored them in Win 10, copied the data back onto the mirrored drives, set up the appropriate shared folders, and enabled Windows 10 DLNA function. It now seems to operate exactly as a NAS / media server should and functionally mimics the Zyxel only much faster. As I understand it, if I need a more sophisticated media server function I can add Plex, Universal Media Server or Kodi, but I don't know much about this. The upside is I can still use this as a PC to surf the internet, pick up email, stream TV, play music etc. as well as it functioning as a NAS/media server on the network. The only problem that I can see is that Windows 10 isn't a particularly stable platform, with Microsoft making a concerted effort to break it every six months or so with their 'features' updates.
So am I missing something here? What is it that makes QNAP and Synology NAS/media servers worth nearly twice as much as the equivalent PC?