We took the consequence of a huge electricity bill today by getting a
Qnap NAS TS-212. It's
a pretty sleek device, doesn't take up a lot of space at all, and better
still, has a very low power consumption. 21W at active state compared to
lots and lots in my 7 year old desktop with an external USB drive.
The Qnap has got space for two internal drives, up to 2TB each. Which is
what I decided to stuff into it, straight away (the entire setup cost me
2.650 kr / 355 euros). The device allows you to setup the drives pretty
easily, as single disks, JBOD configuration, raid 1 or raid 0. I went
for raid 1 as the device was more for backup than actually storage - as
storage space is cheap it makes more sense to pay for security.
Configuration and setup of the device is overall very easy - the web
interface is pretty easy to deal with. The quick install manual that
comes with the device specified to connect to the device directly if
installing from linux - however, if you plug it into a DHCP capable
router or such it'll pick up an IP automatically and you can just
connect to that, no trouble.
There's only one thing I'm unhappy with so far in the setup process: as
noted, I chose the raid 1 setup which means mirrored drives. For some
strange, outerworld reasoning, at the end of the configuration, the
device decided that the two drives should be sync'ed in order to mirror
correctly - which seems to mean copying 2TB of nothing from one drive to
the other. In total 5 hours 30 minutes of copying no data from one drive
to another. I honestly have no idea why it decided to waste my time
like that ...
Other points of interest is that the system allows for interfacing
through a large range of protocols. Personally, I'm rather happy to see
it support ssh. The device runs Qnaps own linux distro (the firmware I
downloaded contains kernel 2.6.33.2) so you can dabble with a lot of
things through that. If that's not enough, there's also the possibility
for putting other distros on the device (Debian for example), so you can
customize to your hearts content.
Overall, I'm happy with the device at this point. I'll try to write
another post in a month or so when I've had the time to setup backups
and play with some of the different features of the system.