Anyone have a QNAP NAS or HP Media Vault

[Lestat]

im looking to get a little dual bay NAS setup.
gotta be gigabit lan though. i have had a couple of 10/100 units and the best you could ever hope for is about 5mb/sec over the lan.

if gigabit NAS's allow for true gigabit speeds then you should be able to see speeds way beyond that.

so,,, after looking around it seems that the QNAP TS-209 Pro is the best, but i see the new HP Media Vault's look nice. (the new black cube model)

anyone have one of these who can chime in and give me your honest opinion on it.
LAN speeds
FTP
SMB
file sharing (windows, linux etc)
do either one allow streaming to the xbox360 ?

thx in advance guys/gals for any personal experience you can share.

[Lestat]

well after doing more and more research, speed alone the QNAP kicks the hell out of all of the SOHO/HOME dual drive and single drive hardware.

i been looking into the Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo 1TB and it can be had for around $280 and it COMES WITH 2x 500gb Drives!!!

now thats $100 cheaper than the QNAP and the QNAP doesnt come with any drives.

both seem to be very well rounded units with lots of features.

one HUGE thing for me though is the ability to stream movies (avi/mpeg) and HDWMV to my xbox360.
if i read correctly someone at newegg said the QNAP does indeed stream to the 360. which i find odd because of the 360's wacko requirements for streaming.
i currently use a dual drive usb enclosure in JBOD w/ 2x 500gb drives connected directly to the 360 and can watch whatever i want.
(before anyone says "you can't do that" maybe you should go read a little bit and go grab yourself a copy of MacDrive. the 360 see's drives formatted in Mac formatting (not sure if its Ext3 or 2 or FATx)

anyways,, i also want it or streaming xvid/divx to my Xbox 1 via XBMC. which i do alot of. i have one in the bedroom as a mediacenter only, and one in the living room as a media center and gaming box.

anywho,,, speed is key for me not only in reading but writing,, i need to be able to dump files onto it as fast as it will take it, and unfortunately Slashdot has the Buffalo as 2nd to last in terms of performance. now granted this was a review from a while ago so i cant tell what the latest firmware(s) linux OS updates have included.

its a tough choice but the research is showing the QNAP for the win, but the buffalo is a steal frankly with the included 2x 500gb drives.

hopefully someone can chime in and give their opinions on any of these 3 devices i have spoken about.

[Buckeye]

I have a 1TB Buffalo TeraStation, 4x 250 MB drives.

I have it setup on Raid 5 config and I only use it for long term storage stuff, like my MSDN Library and other stuff, and connected through my router. It is painfully slow.

I have had 1 drive go out on it during the course of a year or that I have had it. It was just a matter of finding a 250 GB drive, taking the thing apart and replacing the bad drive and then rebuilding the Raid which took about an hour.

I don’t know about streaming any audio or video off of it, never tried.

Though I have heard that a WHS works pretty well for that.
I also have a 3 TB WHS which I use for auto backups which works very well.
You might want to check the WHS forums out, they have some pretty good info on WHS.
http://forums.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/default.aspx?siteid=50

[ZOMGVTEK]

I have a old DFI mobo with gigabit lan and a good ol P4 sitting in the basement with 2 WD 1TB drives in raid 1, and i get about 40-50 mb/s over the lan no problem. Wireless gets almost the same.

Just get a crappy cheap mobo with gigabit lan and raid?

[Lestat]

I have a old DFI mobo with gigabit lan and a good ol P4 sitting in the basement with 2 WD 1TB drives in raid 1, and i get about 40-50 mb/s over the lan no problem. Wireless gets almost the same.

Just get a crappy cheap mobo with gigabit lan and raid?

yeah the old system with gigabit card in it was going to be my last option.

i was looking for a nice small little unit to just throw a couple of drives in.

right now i have 5 IDE to usb enclosures and a couple of Sata to USB enclosures
usually all of them doing something or storing something. oh and a single bay IDE NAS that i just swapped drives around in last night and got it running (a massive whopping 4.1-4.5mb/sec transfer rates)
most of the enclosures have 250gb or 320gb drives except for one and thas my 2x500gb spanning enclosure which i would love to get another one but i cant find them anymore.

[Gogeta]

Once you've decided on hardware, take a look at FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org). It has an excellent web-based interface and will really make the hardware shine, especially if its older. Browse through the screenshots to get a better feel for its capability. It tears apart any software bundled with commercial NAS products that I've seen.

[Th3MadScientist]

Look into the D-Link DNS-323. It has gotten great reviews and I'm gonna pick one up when I get paid. It's about $180 and has a gigabit NIC. Although I don't know about if it would stream to the Xbox. I'm pretty sure the xbox 360 NIC is only 10/100. I'm a use mine to store my VMware virtual OS's in Raid 1.

[Lestat]

nah nothing from d-link is worth buying not in their consumer nas catagory

i have decided to go with the Synology 207+

1)
gigabit ethernet shown to crush any other consumer nas device for speeds
2)
supports 1TB drives (total of 2)
3)
100% verified and working streaming to the Xbox360 (and PS3 for you ps3losers i mean lovers lol)
4)
very very very feature rich options and GUI

fantstic support and firmware updates.

if i was going for jsut a regular NAS i would probably buy the buffaly Linkstation 1TB because it has 2x 500gb drives in it already and can be had for around 275$

but for what i need the Synology 207+ is a fantastic piece of hardware...

too bad its over $300 and doesnt include any drives,.,, which i think is a rip off but as they say,, you get what you pay for..


freenas also doesnt support the Xbox360.
read thru the forums you will see that very few if anyone has been ableto make it work successfully.

i dont want anything to run on a pc, although if i recall freenas can be loaded on a few nas drives out there.

if i were to make a little pc to do the streaming i would just load vista and do it via media center or via WMP 11 sharing....

why mess around with some half arsed open source program that doesnt work when windows has it built in :) (sorry to the guys who make free nas,, good effort but alot more work to be done)