Capacity On A Budget
If you're looking to serve a lot of data
over your NAS but don't want to spend a lot of money, D Link's ShareCenter
Pulse is hard to beat. Costing just $81.6, this dual bay NAS supports up to 6TB
and supports any normal SATA 3.5" drives. The ShareCenter looks good as
well, with the ubiquitous glossy piano black finish and surprising build
quality for such a modest price. In terms of features, it's respectable, with
the usual UPnP and DLNA streaming features, iTunes library support, BitTorrent,
HTTP and FTP servicing capabilities. There's also a one-touch back up facility
that will automatically copy the contents of a USB-attached storage device to
the NAS. Where compromises have been made is in performance. In our reading and
writing tests, the ShareCenter could only manage a sedate 14MB/s read speed and
12MB/S write. This makes it only really suitable for 100Mbps networks rather
than gigabit, where your performance will already be bottlenecked by the
throughput of your network.
Performance Business User
If you need a high-performance NAS box for
your business and don't mind paying for the privilege, the Synology DS1511+ is
the fastest NAS we have reviewed. In a RAID 5 configuration, which combines
performance as well as protection against disk failures, we managed to record a
transfer rate of 110MB/s when reading and 104MB/S when writing. This is
comparable in performance to an internal hard drive (providing you have the
necessary gigabit networking infrastructure to get the best out of it) and will
mean you'll be able to back up even 1000GB of data in less than two and half
hours - an order of magnitude faster than entry-level NAS boxes. Naturally this
performance comes at a price. As a five-bay NAS, the DS1511 isn't a cheap
model, and at $1350.4 for the enclosure without drives, you can expect an
overall spend of close to $2000 to fully take advantage of its features. Fortunately,
there's more to the DS1511+ than just speed, because it provides a whole host
of features as well. As you would hope, FTP/HTTP serving is provided, it
doubles as a media streaming server, has support for multiple user accounts,
offers Active Directory, and can accommodate even more storage with the
addition of external hard drives. A print server is included and you can even
turn it into a video surveillance device by connecting up to 20 IP attached
cameras.
A final feature of this exceptional small
business NAS is its expandability. By hooking up a DX510 expander, you can add
a further five bays, increasing your potential storage capacity to a massive
30TB.
Wireless NAS
Ethernet cables trailing across the floor
simply isn't feasible in some homes, particularly if you live in shared
accommodation and don't have access to the router directly. In this kind of
property, wireless technology is the only feasible option.
Fortunately, there are now a number of
wireless NAS drives on the market, which could be ideal for your requirements.
LaCie provides its 'Wireless Space' product in a number of capacities. As well
as providing you with backup facilities over the air, the LaCie has several
other clever tricks up its sleeve. Firstly, it can double up as a wireless
range extender, so you can set the LaCie at a good intermediate point between
the router and the limits of your existing coverage, boosting range. It can
even double up as a router itself, as it has four Ethernet ports on the rear
(one in, three out). This won't be suitable for ADSL users, but if you use a
cable modem or need to connect your network to another one, it could be a
useful feature. As you would hope, the LaCie supports the latest 802.11n
wireless standards for snappy transfer rates, and in our testing it surprised
us with its unexpectedly good performance. With read speed of close to 30MB/s
and with writing not much slower, it's actually faster than some wired NAS
boxes.
Iomega also offers a wireless storage
product, but it doesn't actually include any storage. The iConnect Wireless
Data Station instead converts USB products you already own into a wireless NAS
solution or, indeed, a wired NAS solution via the built-in gigabit networking
support. It supports pen drives, external USB hard drives and even printers,
all over 802.11n wireless. Performance isn't great, but at $110.4 it's an
affordable way of adding some centrally served storage to an existing wireless
network, all the while utilising USB storage devices you probably already own.
Built-in NAS Support From Your Router?
Quite a few routers now ship with USB
ports in the back. On some devices these are only used for diagnostic or data
connections, but in some cases they can allow you to connect an external USB
2.0 hard drive and share it over your network. Even the much-maligned BT Home
Hub offers this functionality, although it's extremely limited. Drives have
to be formatted as FAT32 rather than NTFS (unless using the latest Home Hub
3.0) and performance is pretty poor at just over 4.5MB/s. Nevertheless, this
could be just the ticket if you just need a quick and dirty way of sharing
some files over your network. Also, as this is essentially free
functionality, you can't complain too much if the performance isn't
brilliant!
