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.