Cheap 2-Bay NAS recommendation

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IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
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I'm in search of a cheap 2-Bay (RAID1) diskless NAS to use as an off-site backup for some personal information and maybe VM snapshots. Performance is pretty much irrelevant as it's connected via a 100Mbps site-to-site VPN so I can't write faster than 10MB/s anyways.

Any suggestions / links?
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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For that usage pretty much anything will work :) Even my OLD OLD NetGear RadyNas with WD Green could do 10Mb/s and wroked for years, in fact I still have it sitting here with 2x1TB Green init! LOL.
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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WD my cloud or similar would do the job I guess and cheap.
 

IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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WD my cloud or similar would do the job I guess and cheap.
I want something with hot swap so I can easily upgrade the drives if I need to without opening up the chassis. I know hot swap is one of those "premium" features costs more and is hardly used but I'm so used to it now I can't go back.
 

RTM

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Jan 26, 2014
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Although they do not support hot swap, I would like to suggest HP's Microserver Gen8.
If the US prices are similar to here in the EU, it should be possible to find one for about the same amount of money as a Synology DS216j.
It uses a x86 CPU, so you can install whatever software you want on it, thus getting software support and security updates for a potentially very long time.

Also on another note, I think most lower end NAS devices use the disks for storing the OS, making it quite cumbersome to do a "simple disk upgrade".
 

IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
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Although they do not support hot swap, I would like to suggest HP's Microserver Gen8.
If the US prices are similar to here in the EU, it should be possible to find one for about the same amount of money as a Synology DS216j.
It uses a x86 CPU, so you can install whatever software you want on it, thus getting software support and security updates for a potentially very long time.

Also on another note, I think most lower end NAS devices use the disks for storing the OS, making it quite cumbersome to do a "simple disk upgrade".
Well yea I realize anytime I upgrade the drives Ill need a to wipe all the data to build a new array but that's to be expected and won't happen often. The HP Microserver's are nice but larger than I'd want. Building my own NAS is not out of the question but since performance is pretty much a non factor here I'd rather save the trouble if there is no money saving benefit.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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I was gonna say there's a 8 bay hot swap in the for sale forum. :cool: