Synology RS2211 NAS - anything better for the money (£1200 ex VAT)?

feenster99 · 6 Feb 2012 at 17:33

Hi all,
I'm looking at buying a NAS. It needs to have a capacity of 10 - 20TB, using SATA discs off the shelf, setup in RAID-5.

I've spotted the Synology RS2211 NAS which is a 10 bay device that takes SATA-300 drives. It has an Atom dual core, and can take up to 3GB of DDR-2. It's retailing for about £1200 ex VAT (with no drives).

Has anyone used one, or is there something better out there for the money? It will be used for storage of lots of small files for a proprietary piece of software. Read/write speeds of around 100MB/s would be fine (iSCSI, VMWare compatibility etc is not important - just Samba shares over the network is fine).

Cheers,
Matt

kerrgreg · 7 Feb 2012 at 08:54

would you maybe be better off using a bespoke system for this considering the follow:

(case to hold 10x 2tb drives)
PSU 600w? £50
Atom dual core < £100
ram < £20
Raid card ~£300?
Would probailty need some sort of sata breakout or multi-lane adaptor about £20-30

I think the cost could be lower if you built it yourself however it does appear once you want more than 4 drives in a NAS the price increases at an incredible rate!

My only concern is the use of raid5 on such a large volume with only one disk attempting to hold the parity for that amount of data means if you have a failure its possible the data will not be able to be saved as the algrorithum struggles to deliver with such vast amounts of data. Although looking at the amount of drives you wish to use Im sure another drive for 5e or raid 6 would not be a problem

cheechm · 7 Feb 2012 at 10:48

Have a look at some of the top end QNAP stuff. Its starting to get a lot bigger and better.

feenster99 · 7 Feb 2012 at 13:26

I'd prefer an off the shelf product as I need something fairly quickly and don't want the hassle of maintaining it. Good point about going for RAID 6 though as the rebuild time will be slow.

I'll have a look at some of the QNAP devices too. Any recommendations in particular?

cheechm · 7 Feb 2012 at 13:44

Its a bit more at around £1,600 but TS-1079 PRO