I’ve used Qnap devices for a few years now and been really happy with the 419p+ box that I have. Its got a great user interface and “just works” with 4 x 2tb hard disks in it the capacity is about 6tb.
Since I’m a huge advocate of SSD’s and the larger drives have reached a good price level now, I decided to buy a smaller qnap NAS to fill with 1tb Samsung SSDs (see the smaller box on the right in the title picture). This makes a total storage size of about 3tb with RAID enabled.
The setup was incredibly easy, I just popped the drives in the device and booted it up. You need to use the Qnap finder software to identify the temporary IP address, then give it a static IP and name. Once that’s done, I upgraded the firmware to the latest version and checked out some of the Qnap plugins available. I setup sabnzbd (which is a newsbin downloader), couchpotato, sickbeard and headphones. Since the NAS runs 24/7 and has no spinning disks any more, this software works wonderfully now.
I checked the power usage compared to my old 419p+ mechanical drive NAS and it uses around 30% of power. I reckon that’s going to save me a fair bit of money over the years with this device! The biggest advantage I find is that the device is now totally silent, the spinning up of disks used to drive me crazy. Not only that, but the NAS is tiny! It is so small you could put it anywhere, its also safe to move around, and the SSDs are so reliable, I now have complete confidence in them. Not to mention the speed! I’m getting about 30mb/s over wireless copying files which is a great improvement over the old NAS of about 10mb/s.
Overall this is one of the best purchases I’ve ever made! I’ve now turned the other 2 NAS’s off, and just use this one as a daily media storage.
The ramblings of a systems admin 