NAS
The network-attached storage (NAS) market had a break-out decade in the 2010s, with a large number of vendors trying to get a slice of the pie. Brands such as EMC / Lenovo and Thecus have fallen by the wayside, and even established storage vendors like Seagate decided to drop out of the market. QNAP and Synology have held firm in the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) NAS market meant for home users, prosumers, SOHO, and SMB installations. ASUSTOR (backed by ASUS) has also been regularly releasing NAS units since their first product appeared in late 2012. TerraMaster released their first NAS around the same time, but opted to focus more on the direct-attached storage segment throughout the 2010s. The brand has shown renewed interest in the...
QNAP Releases Haswell-based TVS-x71 and Cortex-A15-based TS-x31+ NAS Lineups
QNAP took the SMB / SOHO NAS market segment by storm with a host of CES announcements. The release of the AMD G-series SoC-based TVS-x63 was undoubtedly QNAP's major...
6 by Ganesh T S on 1/14/2015ioSafe Updates Disaster-Resistant Storage Lineup at CES 2015
At CES 2015, we got the chance to sit down and talk with the folks over at ioSafe. Their disaster-resistant storage devices are unique in the market. We reviewed...
3 by Ganesh T S on 1/14/2015Asustor's 5 Series Packs Intel Bay Trail Celerons
Since last CES, a couple of Asustor offerings have been put under our review scanner, and we were naturally excited to meet up with them at CES 2015. Towards...
3 by Ganesh T S on 1/12/2015AMD Enters NAS Market with QNAP's 10G-Ready TVS-x63
QNAP's CES suite was quite busy when we visited them last week. Considering the number of product and feature announcements that were made, it wasn't a surprise at all...
21 by Ganesh T S on 1/11/2015Synology's BeyondCloud Series - NAS Units made User-Friendly
Synology has put out some interesting updates (both expected as well as unexpected) in the lead up to the new year. At CES 2015, the focus is on a...
12 by Ganesh T S on 1/6/2015QNAP TS-853 Pro 8-bay Intel Bay Trail SMB NAS Review
QNAP has focused on Intel's Bay Trail platform for this generation of NAS units (compared to Synology's efforts with Intel Rangeley). While the choice made sense for the prosumer-targeted...
58 by Ganesh T S on 12/29/2014HGST Deskstar NAS 6 TB Review
The increasing affordability of SSDs has put a strain on the traditional market for hard drive vendors. However, hard drives continue to remain the storage medium of choice for...
36 by Ganesh T S on 12/23/2014Holiday Guides 2014: COTS NAS Units
We have already published holiday guides for mobile devices, motherboards, GPUs and SSDs. Today, we will take a look at the various options available in the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS...
26 by Ganesh T S on 12/17/2014Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD 6 TB Review
Hard drives continue to remain the storage medium of choice for applications where capacity and cost factors outweigh performance requirements. Vendors have also realized that enterprise hard drives are...
52 by Ganesh T S on 12/10/2014Synology's DS2015xs brings ARM to High-Performance NAS Units
In the current NAS market, it is downright impossible to talk of ARM and high performance together. The most powerful ARM-based NAS units have been based on Marvell's ARMADA...
27 by Ganesh T S on 12/9/2014Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD: WD Red Pro Gets a Competitor
We have seen this story play out before. Western Digital delineates the hard drive market with a product aimed at a particular niche and Seagate comes in a few...
22 by Ganesh T S on 12/2/2014Asustor AS7008T 8-bay Intel Haswell SMB NAS Review
Asustor is one of the recent entrants in the NAS market. Over the last couple of years, they have tried to play in the same space as QNAP and...
29 by Ganesh T S on 11/30/2014HGST Deskstar NAS 4 TB Review
The increasing affordability of SSDs has put a strain on the traditional market for hard drive vendors. However, new opportunities have opened up, thanks to the rapid growth in...
40 by Ganesh T S on 11/22/2014Synology DS1815+ 8-bay Intel Rangeley SMB NAS Review
Synology started the roll-out of their SMB-targeted NAS units based on Intel's latest Atom platform (Rangeley) in September 2014. We have already looked at the 4-bay DS415+ in detail...
65 by Ganesh T S on 11/18/2014Synology Launches 8-bay Rangeley-based DS1815+
In the last week of September, Synology launched their Intel Rangeley-based DS415+. In our review, we found it resolved most of the issues encountered in the previous Atom-based SMB...
11 by Ganesh T S on 11/4/2014Synology DS415+ Review: DSM on Intel Rangeley
Synology recently launched the DS415+, their first Intel Rangeley-based NAS. This 4-bay NAS, targeted towards SMBs and SOHOs, finally brings about hardware accelerated encryption capabilities to DSM in the...
42 by Ganesh T S on 10/30/2014Synology Launches Rangeley-based DS415+, DSM 5.1 Beta Goes Live
Synology has been relatively quiet over the last couple of months (barring the responses to various security issues), but, today, they are coming out with a couple of expected...
15 by Ganesh T S on 9/23/2014PROMISE FileCruiser: A Private Dropbox-like Solution for SMBs and SMEs
PROMISE Technology launched a private Dropbox-like cloud storage solution for enterprise file synchronization and sharing last week. Dubbed 'FileCruiser', this is a comprehensive solution targeting SMBs and SMEs (particularly...
8 by Ganesh T S on 8/28/2014Seagate's Intel Rangeley NAS Pro 4-bay Review
Seagate recently rebooted their NAS offerings, completely revamping their 2013 Business Storage lineup and dropping that software platform altogether. In its place, they adopted a Debian-based offering, NAS OS...
14 by Ganesh T S on 8/27/2014Recovering Data from a Failed Synology NAS
It was bound to happen. After 4+ years of running multiple NAS units 24x7, I finally ended up with a bricked NAS. Did I lose data? Were my recovery...
55 by Ganesh T S on 8/22/2014