The DiskStation DS214se is Synology’s economical two-bay NAS with the capability to host, share, and protect data and is optimized to be an personal NAS server running the ever incomparable DiskStation Manager (DSM).
Enterprise Drives: Fact or Fiction?
Backblaze looks at drive failures in their company and discovers little difference in failure rates of enterprise vs consumer drives.
Ubuntu Server 13.10 Released with Two Stable SSD Caching Options
Ubuntu Server 13.10 is out, and with it comes the 3.11 kernel with production-ready Bcache and dm-cache SSD caching options. SSD caching can help speed up NAS devices significantly by allowing reads and writes to hit SSDs before slower rotational media.
Ubuntu 13.1o is considered a stable release, although it’s only supported for 9 months. The next release will be 14.04 LTS with 5 years of support.
Information about other server package updates in Ubuntu 13.10 can be found in the release notes.
Battle of the 4 TB NAS Drives: WD Red and Seagate NAS HDD Face-Off
AnandTech reviews and benchmarks the Western Digital Red, Seagate NAS HDD, Western Digital SE, and Western Digital RE 4 TB NAS hard drives.
The correct choice of hard drives for a NAS system is influenced by a number of factors. These include expected workloads, performance requirements and power consumption restrictions, amongst others. In this review, we will discuss some of these aspects while evaluating four different hard drives targeting the NAS market:
via AnandTech | Battle of the 4 TB NAS Drives: WD Red and Seagate NAS HDD Face-Off.
Western Digital Red 4 TB and 2.5″ NAS Drives Released
Western Digital today released a 4 TB 3.5″ Red NAS drive, along with expanding the Red line to include 2.5 inch drives in 750 GB and 1 TB configurations. Storage Review has already published benchmarks for the 4 TB drive and the 1 TB 2.5″ drive.
BitTorrent Sync: Turning Your Old Computer into an NAS Drive
The BitTorrent Blog describes how to get BitTorrent Sync running on FreeNAS.
So you’ve upgraded to a new computer. Congratulations. Now you have to decide what to do with that old computer. Give it to your parents? Reenact your favorite scene from Office Space? How about you turn that piece of junk into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device running BitTorrent Sync. It may not play Crysis, but it will provide you with a plethora of options including FTP, redundant storage, and most importantly, BitTorrent Sync.
Recommend a NAS to Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds is asking for a NAS recommendation on Google+:
If it runs Linux, that’s obviously a plus, but no, I’m not looking for something to play with. Quite the reverse. I’m looking for something I can ignore and not worry about.
via Linus Torvalds
How to offload your iTunes library to a NAS
One of its more frustrating aspects is its lack of an officially supported server component—Apple seems stubbornly unwilling to provide a real iTunes server, and so folks who would otherwise happily centrally locate a media library on a perfectly suitable NAS are stuck with islands of music.
via Ars Technica.
Ask Slashdot: Easiest Way To Consolidate Household Media? – Slashdot
A recent Ask Slashdot quickly turned into suggestions for setting up every type of NAS possible.
DIY simple NAS on budget
User mzepan wrote in with a DIY NAS running FreeNAS and sporting a custom case. Check it out here.
Hacked together NAS in a box
Hack a Day brings us a low powered OpenWRT NAS in a tin box.
Five Best NAS Enclosures
Lifehacker has a list of the top five NASs, as voted by their readers.
Earlier in the week we asked you which NAS enclosures you thought were the best. We heard your nominations loud and clear, and now we’re back to take a look at the top five.
Drobo Releases Faster 5N NAS
New features include a faster processor and an optional SSD cache.
Read more about it at Ars Technica and Drobo.com.
A fast NAS with class: 5 months with the Synology DS-412+
Ars Technica provides a 6 page review of the Synology DS-412+, focusing on features, software, and pretty much everything you’d want to know about any NAS.
Other contenders in the home NAS space include QNAP, NetGear, and Iomega, but I went with Synology chiefly due to their reputation for performance. The DroboFS was the very definition of “easy to use,” but after more than a year the slow read and write speeds just became too much. After scouring forums and reviews to find a replacement, I kept coming back to the then-newly released DS-412+.
via Ars Technica
Western Digital Red NAS Hard Drive Review
Western Digital released a hard drive aimed directly at home NAS users. It should also work great for home file servers, and any server where a 5400 RPM SATA drive is appropriate.
WD has several features that they’re touting as critical for the NAS user including; NASware specialized firmware, Intellipower low power spindle, robust NAS compatibility list, three year warranty and a dedicated WD Red 24×7 customer support line (1-855-55-WDRED if you need them).