I have a few different NAS units in the house. I like buying things to tinker with. Amazon's 30 days returns are a godsend, it means I can buy stuff and play with it for 30 days then return it for a full refund.
So, I had an Asustor AS-604T. Nice machine. Fast. Quiet. Lots of apps I needed (DNLA server, SQL, NZBDrone, NZBGet, Transmission). No real problems with it apart from throwing SMART errors in error. It always deemed my Seagate drives as faulty. It also reported My WD Reds as having bad sectors, which they plainly don't. 35-50W power consumption.
The I got a Synology DS214+. It was an excellent little machine, but my main issue with the Synology is they're stuck with SMB1.0. In a Windows environment, that's unacceptable. smbd hogs CPU. Also Synology don't seem to be able to figure out that some of us would like some of our drives to spin down while others stay running, which the Asustor can do. But, Synology spread the OS across all drives, so all drive keep on spinning unless you're running literally nothing on the machine. Not such an issue on the DS214+ as it only has two drives, but the DS414j and DS414 I tried would run their drives 24/7 needlessly. The 414j also had marginal cooling, so my Toshiba drives ran very hot, over 50C even with "Cool" mode enabled. The two drive 214+ used much less power, 18-30W.
So, I finally bit the bullet and went back to a Windows server. AsRock miniITX board, i3-4350, 16GB ECC RAM, Intel SSD, and my HDDs in a pool thanks to StableBit DrivePool. Running SMB3.2 thanks to Server 2012R2 Update 1. Gives me way, way better performance on my wifi clients. With a non-80Plus PSU I'm getting 28-42W power consumption. An 80Plus Gold PSU is sitting on my desk to be fitted, which hopefully will reduce power consumption a little more. I also have the bonus of Hyper-V.
Consumer NAS units are a good solution, but they all seem to have flaws. Feeble SMB support, poor power management, or just plain lying about drive condition.
So, I had an Asustor AS-604T. Nice machine. Fast. Quiet. Lots of apps I needed (DNLA server, SQL, NZBDrone, NZBGet, Transmission). No real problems with it apart from throwing SMART errors in error. It always deemed my Seagate drives as faulty. It also reported My WD Reds as having bad sectors, which they plainly don't. 35-50W power consumption.
The I got a Synology DS214+. It was an excellent little machine, but my main issue with the Synology is they're stuck with SMB1.0. In a Windows environment, that's unacceptable. smbd hogs CPU. Also Synology don't seem to be able to figure out that some of us would like some of our drives to spin down while others stay running, which the Asustor can do. But, Synology spread the OS across all drives, so all drive keep on spinning unless you're running literally nothing on the machine. Not such an issue on the DS214+ as it only has two drives, but the DS414j and DS414 I tried would run their drives 24/7 needlessly. The 414j also had marginal cooling, so my Toshiba drives ran very hot, over 50C even with "Cool" mode enabled. The two drive 214+ used much less power, 18-30W.
So, I finally bit the bullet and went back to a Windows server. AsRock miniITX board, i3-4350, 16GB ECC RAM, Intel SSD, and my HDDs in a pool thanks to StableBit DrivePool. Running SMB3.2 thanks to Server 2012R2 Update 1. Gives me way, way better performance on my wifi clients. With a non-80Plus PSU I'm getting 28-42W power consumption. An 80Plus Gold PSU is sitting on my desk to be fitted, which hopefully will reduce power consumption a little more. I also have the bonus of Hyper-V.
Consumer NAS units are a good solution, but they all seem to have flaws. Feeble SMB support, poor power management, or just plain lying about drive condition.
I'm Josh A.K.A CLF over there.