Some days back my prefered tech equipment dealer (Amazon ;-) shipped me my new NAS (network attached storage) system for my home network. I picked a QNAP 412 NAS system after a long long period of checking, comparing features and pricetags as well as reading tons of user comments and ratings. For sure the QNAP 412 is not the newest one you can buy from QNAP, but it has a very good price/feature/performance rate and of course QNAP is one of the bigger player for NAS in home and small office environment.
QNAP 412 provides basically an 4 slot RAID (0,1,5…) based NAS system with two gigabit ethernet ports and USB plugs for connecting additional external hard discs as well as printers. You can get to your files on the NAS via SAMBA/windows share or NFS or FTP/SFTP. QNAP integrates perfectly into AD domains or can maintain local user and groups. Well this is basic NAS stuff. In addition QNAP supports several different backup mechanism like RSYNC to receive files from your clients or even activly backup your files.
Besides this QNAP brings: Twonkey Media server so that your TV, phone or tablet can easily stream video or music from/to the NAS. QNAP also has an own medial library web gui so that you can access/see/hear your music and video files via browser. If this is not sufficient QNAP can also host your blog or web page, because it brings an PHP/mySQL enabled web server.
If you feel your data is still not safe enough you can connect QNAP NAS to your prefered cloud storage and push your data to the cloud storage automatically. Some people may like this idea, I’am definetly not. It suffient that google already has all my email, they dont need all my personal files as well.
- Regards the admin gui there is just one commen: perfect, nice looking, easy to understand and just working well!
- Noice: QNAP has temperature controled fans and its really perfect for your living room or you can put it into your bedroom. There is nearly ZERO noice. Anyway, my NAS is sitting in my network rack in the basement and just runs and runs and runs.
- If you have your QNAP somewhere at a hidden place like the very last corner in your basement, its important that you get notifed without physically checking each day if something happens to the NAS. No problem at all: QNAP supports SMS, Email (via SSL, TLS) and SNMPtraps to notify you about faults or critical events.
Finally i can only tell you: just spend a some more bugs, but get an NAS solution which you can rely on. Always keep in mind that you might not can trust an rely on a cheap 99 bugs NAS and put all you important data to it.
Product description: http://www.qnap.com/de/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=193 (german language)
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