NASLite Network Attached Storage

For my office, I've been using NL on the same server since 2004 or 2005 and it is working great. Friends talked me into testing Synology DS312 with 2 x 2Tb WD Red drives. DS comes with plenty of bells and whistles (remote access, personal cloud, personal disk space for all the family members, video stations etc).

I copied all the files from the NL server to the Synology DS. Changed all the settings of the programs on the 4 client computers and closed down NL. First reaction, "Hey, how come this thing is so slow ? What did I do wrong ?". Checking, closing down services, testing and more testing. Even opening a PDF file via my program is slow And, I'm only talking about local access. The distant access is slow but this is normal due to ADSL but local on GB Lan is not normal.

Anyway, after trying and testing for 10 days, I turned on NL, copied all the files back and set the pointer to NL and suddenly, life was easy, fun and FAST !

... the winner is NL and by a good margin. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles but for the office, I don't really need them.

Robby

interesting - i beg to differ in some ways - someone gave me a D-Link nas - 2 x 2TB drives - how could i say no

so gave it a try - i ran 2 naslite servers - one as a backup of the other - so copied everything to the D-Link and pointed to that as my main server - its fine - copy times are the same as naslite - it streams as well as naslite - i really notice no difference

other people find it easier to access as all the stuff they want is on one drive - my naslite servers are a collection of older drives - it powers down automatically and powers up when you access the link to it

so for joe public i would say its a good deal - its quick easy and painless to set up - add a drive - power it up and you are 90% there

would i dump naslite and get a second one as a second backup - no - naslite is what it says it is - it has many advantages - all of which have been discussed here

Really depends on the specs of your NL box, most of those consumer nas's are using either a MIPS or ARM processors for fanless low power consumption.

Here's a nice chart on small net builder comparing the speed of consumer nas's, the ones doing 100+ MB/s are probably all using some sort of Intel/AMD processor, hence the price tags of $500-$2000 USD

Where as the lower priced consumer nas's are doing 15-40 MB/s, more than likely contain the low cost processors.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-charts/view