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ZyXEL NSA-2400 Network Storage Appliance

I did not know ZyXEL supplied the NSA!

And whats with the new doooo, did you finally find your ying an yang?

reply to DrTCP
Hi, this is nice...

From what I've read it would be better to dedicate a PC to this task with a 1gb lan card and load Linux, FreeNas or Openfiler...

It's common for these dedicated boxes to have slow data transfer rates...

Otherwise know as a file server....

I don't know, we have used a few of the Fastora NAS boxes, they have a good xfer rate, excellent UI, and tons of features. These purpose built boxes have a few advantages over other solutions...

vs. Linux install: End User will most likely have issues maintaining it. EVEN with Webmin. It's simply not going to be as plug and play as a true NAS.

vs. FreeNAS: I spent much time with FreeNAS trying to get it to work properly and testing to see if it would actually recover from a drive failure. From a raid one, it would recover, however from a raid 5, it was a coin toss. Not to mention that some motherboards won't handle a hot swap.

vs Openfiler: The UI is way to complicated for the typical end user. Also some of the same issues as FreeNAS.

I'm having a hard time getting excited about these boxes after trying a few. They are slow compared to Firewire or eSATA drives, but OK versus USB drives. If you have a server then installing an eSATA card and buying an external eSATA RAID enclosure you get ridiculously fast speeds, expandable hot-swap storage, relatively low cost, and easy management using your existing Win/Mac/Linux server. One example: the Sonnet Fusion 500P enclosure (about $500) and Tempo SATA E4P (about $300). Or you can add FW800 card and put a hard drive into $50-100 enclosure and get 40-100MB/s which is still faster than the low-end NAS boxes which crawl like a turtle at 5-15MB/s.

and, many of the low end nas boxes seem to have problems putting the drives to sleep when they aren't being accessed. in my experience, usb/firewire/esata all sleep correctly (well, as long as your internal drives do).

sleep is important.
--
A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law. -Ben Franklin

reply to DrTCP
I saw a demo of one of those in Shanghai almost 2 years ago, not really impressed, the gui at that time was like the former yellow blue and white gui of the zywalls.
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"Perl is executable line noise, Python is executable pseudo-code."

I'm not impressed with any low-end NAS boxes, and that includes the top rated boxes. Suppose there is a market, but I'd rather attach a $500 eSATA cage to an existing server.

I'm building a storage server for my LAN based on a 64 bit AMD with 2GB RAM, using Solaris10 06/06 and its new ZFS file system on 4 300GB SATA disks. Samba for the Windows machines, and an NFSv4 server that works. The thing flies, and actually cost less than Euro 1200. The Antec case even has hot-swap caddies for the SATA drives (or so they look - I've not tried hot-plugging a disk yet - squeamish). First tests show that it pushes data out at a steady 45MB/s, not too shabby, and it might even be faster with faster clients and/or some tuning.

Plus it's a real OS, and it'll also run an MTA, NNTP server, NTP server, one of the DNS caches on the LAN, an LDAP server, and some assorted odds and ends. Far superior to any NAS setup, but it requires a bit of know-how to configure (and maintain). It's great fun, though.

The NAS boxes (Infrant looks quite nice, BTW) are far easier to set up, but not as versatile. Probably just as well for their intended audience.

Better in any case to have one of these to back up to than no backup at all.

Take care,

Stefaan
--
"Technically, Windows is an 'operating system,' which means that it supplies your computer with the basic commands that it needs to suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, stop operating." -Dave Barry

reply to DrTCP
I got a QNAP TS-101 which I am quite happy with. What I like is the BT client And next FW will get UPNP AV support, that way I can stream straight from it to my Zensonic 500 networkd high def dvd player

But this is just for home fun/play usage so to me the speed is decent enough based on the cost, which was just the HD, the NAS itself was a gift from a QNAP PM
--
"Perl is executable line noise, Python is executable pseudo-code."

Btw DRTCP congratulations with the grade!!!

And just to prove how nerdy I am, I installed »www.rstack.org/phphop/ on my NAS..... its sad I know....
--
"Perl is executable line noise, Python is executable pseudo-code."

reply to DrTCP
Just wanted to jump in and share the results of some Netbench testing we've done.

Netbench Testing results
NSA-2400 - 107/97
Buffalo Tera Station Pro - 27/32
Infrant ReadyNAS - 39/36
Intel SS4000E - 12/12

First number is RAID1 score, second number is RAID 5 score.

Funny, the same numbers as in the ZyAcadamy slides

reply to ShawnZ1

reply to dslpartner
anyone ever find a price on this thing?

reply to bbarrera

reply to jig

pthpt. that's too expensive