The consumer NAS market segment is growing at a very fast rate, with 2 and 4-bay solutions leading the trend. While some vendors choose to compete on feature set (which tends to push up the price), others choose to approach from the cost perspective…
The consumer NAS market segment is growing at a very fast rate, with 2 and 4-bay solutions leading the trend. While some vendors choose to compete on feature set (which tends to push up the price), others choose to approach from the cost perspective…
At Computex 2014, we visited QNAP and came away with a lot of information (some of which had already been demonstrated at CES). After Computex, QNAP got in touch with me to better explain the various features of the newly introduced TS-x51 series (which was not at CES). And, boy, was I floored?! Usually, you don’t see me getting very excited over a product announcement. However, I believe that QNAP’s TS-x51 family has the capability to revolutionize the NAS market for home users and media enthusiasts, particularly in the way it utilizes Intel Quick Sync technology. Read on to for our analysis of where that market segment is headed, and why the TS-x51’s unique feature set may be the start of interesting things to come.
NAS units capable of only accepting 2.5″ drives have been a rarity, but the launch of WD Red drives in that form factor has given a boost to vendors looking to cater to that space. Synology launched a 2.5″-drive only 4-bay NAS back in 2011 (DS411slim). This year, we have a refresh, the DS414slim.
The Synology OS (Disk Station Manager – DSM) has evolved into a very capable, user-friendly and feature-rich server OS in its own right. Its high-performance iSCSI features make it very attractive for virtual machines. The 414slim comes equipped with a very capable SoC (the Marvell ARMADA 370 running at 1.2 GHz, which we already saw in the LenovoEMC ix4-300d) and sports four hot-swappable drive bays, two USB 3.0 ports and two GbE links. Inside the system, we have 512 MB of DRAM. Since 2.5″ drives don’t consume a lot of power, the unit is able to do with a 30W external power adapter.
The small size of the system as well as the massive RAID-able storage capacity (4 x 1.5TB supported currently) and rich networking capabilities make it an ideal mini server for those experimenting with virtualization and have a space-constrained setup.
Intel’s Evansport NAS platform was meant to take on ARM’s dominance in the low to mid-range consumer / SOHO NAS market. We covered it in detail while reviewing the 2-bay Thecus N2560 and 4-bay Asustor AS-304T. Neither of these solutions brought out the full capabilities of the Intel Evansport platform. How does Synology’s Evansport offering – the DS214play – fare? Read on to find out.