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Multi-bay NAS storage shootout
There’s nothing quite like having a system fail and then realizing you hadn't backed up your data. In the back of your mind, you always knew this day might come, but procrastination and poor planning has caught you with your pants down, and you have no one to blame but yourself. “Never again!” you shout, but as your anger eventually subsides, so does your impetus to do something about it.
You don’t have to be that guy. A little wherewithal, a minor amount of planning, and a network-attached storage (NAS) storage appliance will give you peace of mind—and keep your data safe. Owning a NAS box is an excellent way to keep your files organized, backed up, and readily available not just from your own PC, but over your entire network. That includes connected devices such as your smartphone, tablet, game console, and who knows, maybe even your toaster by the time you read this.
We’ve rounded up a collection of five multi-bay NAS boxes, one each from Western Digital, QNAP, Buffalo, Netgear, and LaCie. Each one will happily back up your data to multiple hard drives configured in various levels of RAID, but they’re also capable of much more. We’ll evaluate how easy (or difficult) each one is to set up and use, how they perform, and what kinds of special or unique functionalities they bring to the table, beyond simple storage chores. Put the kids to bed, folks, things are about to get NASty!
Getting to Know NAS
A primer on NAS and how it can benefit you
Let’s be honest: The topic of backing up storage isn’t particularly sexy or glamorous, though it is essential. At some point or another, your current storage device will fail; when it does, will you be prepared? Without a backup in place, you can kiss those vacation photos and home videos of junior taking his first steps goodbye. Once you’ve gotten over the emotional trauma and guilt of having lost all those digitally preserved memories, you can begin thinking of a way to tell your boss that the report you were working on for that multi-million-dollar client is going to be late—very late. There goes that promotion!
One way to avoid these situations is to back up your data to a NAS appliance. In its most basic form, a NAS is any storage device attached to your network that you can access from other PCs and connected devices, hence the reason it’s called “network-attached storage.” It’s your own personal server—your own cloud, if you will—that’s responsible for storing and sharing files. A NAS box is especially handy if you have multiple connected devices in your home, including mobile gadgets like smartphones and tablets.
Not everyone will benefit the in same way from a NAS box. For example, if you only have one or two PCs in your home and don’t care about backing up data from or streaming to other devices, a hard drive or even a USB flash drive connected to your router’s USB port might be all you need. However, you’ll miss out on the other benefits NAS boxes offer, one of the most important of which is redundancy. A basic feature of any multi-bay NAS box is RAID (Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks) support. Depending on the level of RAID you select, if one of the drives in a multi-bay NAS appliance fails, your data remains safe. You’ll want to replace the faulty drive as soon as possible, but unlike relying on a single drive—whether it’s connected to a router or as a storage partition on your system’s internal hard drive or solid-state drive—your backed-up files don’t enter the digital afterlife if a drive gives up the ghost.
There are distinct advantages to using an in-home NAS box versus trusting your data to a third-party cloud provider, too. For one, you don’t have to worry about subscription fees. Even though some cloud-storage options are free, they’re typically capped and limited in functionality. On top of that, you can’t always be sure a free service will remain that way—SugarSync, for example, recently transitioned to a paid-only service. NAS boxes come with an up-front cost, but you own the hardware.
We’d also be remiss to ignore the elephant in the room. The more we learn about our government’s spying tactics, the less likely it seems we can totally avoid the watchful eye of Big Brother, though that doesn’t mean we have to make it overly easy for Uncle Sam to sneak a peek at our files. Anything sent over the Internet is susceptible to spying, not to mention how much cooperation—forced or otherwise—a third-party cloud provider is offering up. It’s not just the government, either—hackers can make off with your data and your credit card details by breaking into a cloud provider’s database. To top it off, access to your backed-up data in the cloud is reliant on both your ISP and your cloud provider; if there’s an outage on either end, you won’t have access to that data.
In short, there are a number of benefits to owning a multi-bay NAS box, but how do you choose one? The answer to that question really depends on how much functionality you want for your dollar. Performance also comes into play. In our experience, machines with bigger, faster processors perform better and are more responsive. There’s a lot of overhead to deal with, plus the fact that today’s NAS boxes are smarter and more capable than ever.
One final word about NAS setup: For irreplaceable files and other important data, you should still maintain a separate, off-site backup in case of a fire, flood, or other disaster.
R.I.P. Windows Home Server
We were disappointed when Microsoft decided to discontinue its Windows Home Server OS—it worked wonderfully with other Windows products—though, truth be told, Redmond had already stuck a fork in the software by removing its nifty drive-extender technology from WHS 2011, the last version ever available. The drive-extender function was groovy because it allowed users to add, upgrade, and replace HDDs without losing their data. For example, if a user was running out of storage space on a setup containing four 1TB hard drives, he could swap out one of the drives and replace it with a 3TB HDD without skipping a beat.
All of the major OEMs have abandoned the now-dead Windows Home Server 2011 OS.As much as we liked WHS, it never quite caught on with most mainstream users. Microsoft had the almost impossible task of trying to explain why a user should spend several hundred dollars rolling his own mini home server, when the average buyer was already reluctant to spend more than a few Benjamins on a new PC. The value proposition became even harder to explain as new PC prices started to nose dive in recent years—you can run out to Best Buy and snag a touchscreen laptop with Windows 8 for less than $400.
Buffalo LinkStation 420
Out of the five NAS boxes represented in this roundup, Buffalo’s LinkStation 420 is the least expensive. It costs around $300 (street) for a unit prepopulated with 4TB of storage, which is how it was sent to us. Other storage capacities include 2TB, 6TB, and 8TB, or you can opt for a diskless version (421e) for around $120 if you already own hard drives.
This is a two-drive box with support for RAID 0 and RAID 1. If you opt for a version with storage, hard drives will occupy both bays—the 8TB model sports a pair of 4TB drives, while the 2TB model uses two 1TB drives. Since it’s only a two-bay NAS box with no JBOD support, you’ll want to decide carefully on your current and future storage needs.
Buffalo attempts to win over consumers by claiming transfer speeds of up to 100MB/s, and in some instances, you’ll hit and even surpass the century mark. The LinkStation 420 especially excels at small file transfers, though performance depends on how you have it configured. Out of the box, Buffalo defaults to RAID 0. This type of RAID doesn’t offer any redundancy and instead splits data across multiple disks for faster throughput. The major downside to this approach is that if one of the drives fails, you lose all your data. In a RAID 1 array, your data is duplicated across both drives and is still retrievable if one of the drives bites the dust.
Surprisingly, switching to a RAID 1 configuration didn’t have a big impact on performance (though the task of switching RAID modes takes several hours to complete). Transferring 1GB of music files from our test bed to the LinkStation took 25 seconds when configured in RAID 0, and 27 seconds in RAID 1. That’s how it played out across the board: only minor performance hits, both in real-world and synthetic benchmarking.
While the RAID configuration didn’t have much of an impact on performance, turning on DLNA did. With DLNA streaming enabled, it took over half a minute longer to copy a 3GB collection of VOB files to the LinkStation versus disabling the streaming service. We suspect that the combination of a 1.2GHz single-core ARM processor and 512MB of RAM is like asking the LinkStation to chew bubble gum and walk at full speed at the same time, so it gets tripped up trying to do both.
Navigating the web interface is pretty straightforward, in part because the LinkStation lacks some of the advanced features found on higher-end (and higher-priced) NAS appliances. Whereas QNAP takes a kitchen sink approach with the TurboNAS TS-470, Buffalo sits way on the other side of the spectrum with a NAS box that offers users little more than the basics. There’s no app support either, so what you see is what you get.
Buffalo’s interface is sparse because there’s not a ton of options to play around with.Buffalo at least covers the bare essentials. The LinkStation supports BitTorrent, you can stream media via DLNA or iTunes, and you can configure FTP settings. For backup chores, it supports Time Machine for Macs and comes with NovaBackup Professional software for Windows. It also supports printer sharing and external storage expansion, but only one or the other at a time via the single USB 2.0 port on the back.
As a basic backup solution, the LinkStation is an attractive bargain. The big upside is you’re not being forced to pay a premium for additional features you may never use or care about, though if you want more from a NAS appliance than simple backups, you’ll need to pony up for a higher-priced alternative with more bells and whistles.
Buffalo LinkStation 420 w/4TB
$300 (street),www.lacie.com
WD My Cloud EX4
A business-savvy box that’s consumer-friendly, too
Western Digital infused the My Cloud EX4 with features that will appeal to both home consumers and small-business owners alike. This means home consumers won’t have to buy a brand-new NAS if their needs grow down the line, while business users have a relatively affordable option that’s easy to use. For example, most home consumers won’t give two spits about the dual LAN ports, but with link aggregation and failover support, a business user can tap into the two ports for additional performance or as protection against a downed connection or cable. If a connection fails for any reason, the EX4 switches to the other connection without skipping a beat. The same goes for the redundant DC power connections on the back of the box, though WD only provides a single external power supply—you’ll have to buy a second one if you’re concerned about it going bad, or as a precaution against little Billy tripping over the power cord.
The EX4’s cloud-based GUI is the sleekest of the bunch and extremely user-friendly. That’s to say you don’t need to be a total networking nerd to navigate the interface and configure tasks like automatic backups, though if you want to dive a little deeper into your LAN, you’ll find a spattering of fine-grain tools to play around with. Many options are accompanied by an information box with brief explanations of their functions. These range from mildly helpful to insultingly obvious—in the Network UPS section, the help box offers clarification on Master and Slave models (that’s helpful), whereas the help box next to the On/Off switch for the WebDAV Service simply states “Enable or disable the WebDAV service” without explaining what it is or does (gee, thanks!).
The EX4 is a four-bay box with support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10, along with spanning and JBOD. Our unit came with 8TB of storage spread across four 2TB WD Red NAS drives spinning at 5400 RPM; it’s also offered in 12TB and 16TB capacities, or sans HDDs if you want to bring your own to the NAS party. A nice convenience of the EX4 is that drives pop right in—no screwdriver needed. Perhaps too convenient, however, are the lack of drive locks. If little Billy isn’t tripping over the power cord, he could still wreak havoc by yanking out a drive and hiding it somewhere in the house.
We tested the EX4 in RAID 5, RAID 1, and RAID 0 modes, though changing it up didn’t seem to impact performance all that much. In our file transfer tests, the EX4 generally lagged behind the competition whether we were dealing with smaller sized files or larger VOB files. This was especially disappointing in RAID 0—given the nominal gains in performance, it’s just not worth the added risk of data loss versus running RAID 1 or RAID 5.
Enabling DLNA also proved a burden for the EX4, which is something we witnessed to some extent on every NAS box tested here. The good news for WD is that the impact was fairly minor on our real-world tests, though the EX4 was one of the slower-performing boxes to begin with.
So, where does leave us? First and foremost, it leaves us wishing the EX4 had a little more pep in its step, which would make it a clear favorite. However, what it lacks in sheer speed it makes up for in features and ease-of-use. If you can live with slower transfers, the EX4 is a fantastic buy for both home and business users.
WD My Cloud EX4 w/8TB
$750 www.wd.com
Netgear ReadyNAS RN102
Fast and compact
If there’s one company we thought might have a leg up in this competition, it’s Netgear, which has spoiled us with its high-performance wireless routers like the WNDR4500 and R7000 (otherwise known as the Nighthawk). The difference here is those are both top-shelf models, whereas the RN102 is part of the entry-level 100 series in the ReadyNAS product line released last year.
Some of Netgear’s NAS boxes are a bit complicated for the average user, so with the ReadyNAS line, the company went back to the drawing board and rebuilt its Linux-based platform from the ground up. The result is ReadyNAS OS 6, a clean and open platform that looks slightly unfinished.
Powering the RN102 is a 1.6GHz single-core ARM-based Marvell Armada 370 processor and 512MB of RAM, the exact same combination Buffalo chose for its LinkStation 420. Both are compact boxes with two drive bays, though Netgear’s carries a slightly larger footprint (3.97x5.59x8.66 inches versus 3.43x5.02x8.07 inches). Nevertheless, the RN102 can be tucked discretely away under the bed or in the corner of a closet. It also offers more connectivity options than the LinkStation—two USB 3.0 ports, a USB 2.0 port, eSATA, and a Kensington lock, compared to just a lonely USB 2.0 port.
With a street price of around $340, the RN102 is wedged between Buffalo’s LinkStation and LaCie’s 2big NAS boxes, which sell on the street for around $250 and $400, respectively. Why not go for the cheapest of the bunch and call it a day? In addition to having more connectivity options than the LinkStation, Netgear’s NAS box is made with metal instead of plastic. We didn’t have the same nervousness yanking drives out of the toolless caddies in the RN102, whereas the LinkStation’s plastic pull-tabs feel chintzy in comparison.
The RN102 supports up to 8TB. Our system came stuffed with a pair of Toshiba 1TB hard drives (7,200rpm, 32MB cache). By default, the RN102 configures itself in RAID 1 with Netgear’s proprietary X-RAID technology, a single-volume architecture that allows you to add storage space without reformatting your drives. Toggling out of X-RAID gives you the option of choosing other configurations—RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10, as well as JBOD. That’s a pretty robust range for an entry-level box.
We tested both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations. Performance was a mixed bag between the two, though generally fast at every turn. The RN102 approached or surpassed the 100MB/s mark in several tests and posted the highest read score in CrystalDiskMark. It also transferred large VOB files faster than both other two-bay NAS boxes. Unsurprisingly, enabling DLNA slowed things down a bit.
The RN102 is capable of more than simple file transfers—it also supports a small but growing number of apps. This isn’t so much a selling point as it is a bonus, at least until developers step to the plate with more app options. As it stands, there are just a handful, one of the more interesting ones being a surveillance app (ReadySurvelliance) that turns the RN102 into a Network Video Recorder (NVR). Using the app and an IP camera, of which there are over 1,000 supported models, you can keep tabs on your business or home remotely from your iPhone or Android smartphone.
Though Netgear markets the RN102 as an entry-level NAS appliance, it comes with a surprising amount of features and solid performance, to boot. Buffalo still has Netgear beat on price, but the RN102’s superior construction, flexibility, and performance makes it easier to recommend.
Netgear ReadyNAS RN102 w/2TB
$340 (street), www.netgear.com
LaCie 2big NAS
Small, stylish, and sturdy storage
It’s a bit ironic that LaCie continues to attach the “2big” moniker to this line of NAS appliances, a naming scheme that belies its compact design. But that doesn’t mean it will go unnoticed by visitors if you leave it out in the open. On the contrary, LaCie’s 2big NAS wins style points for its refreshingly unique design. Whereas most NAS boxes are pretty plain, the 2big NAS looks like a giant heatsink ripped out of an alien spaceship, with a glowing blue orb near the top that gives the box a bit of sci-fi flair. It’s also functional as a physical button and an indicator of drive health. Solid blue is what you want to see—it means everything is normal. A blinking blue LED indicates it’s busy with an activity, while blue and red blinking means it’s building a RAID array or updating its software. What you don’t want to see is a blinking red LED, which is a warning sign that something’s wrong (high temps or a degraded RAID array), and you really hope to avoid a solid red LED, which indicates a critical error. You can disable the LED through software if you don’t care for the persistent mood lighting, especially if you plan to plop the 2big in your bedroom, but events triggering a red alert will still turn on the LED.
LaCie is the only company in this roundup to include several different power adapters. Most civilians won’t care, but if you rack up frequent flier miles like a kid collecting candy on Halloween, you can take the 2big almost anywhere in the world and still have an appropriate power cord to fire it up.
The 2big is yet another NAS box with a single-core ARM processor inside, though it’s clocked at 2GHz like WD’s entry. However, LaCie skimped on RAM, with just 256MB on board, the least amount of any NAS box reviewed here. Connectivity options are also a bit on the sparse side—there’s a single USB 2.0 port and an eSATA port, and of course, a Gigabit LAN to plug into your network. To LaCie’s credit, the 2big came with the longest Ethernet cable, giving users a bit more flexibility in terms of placement.
LaCie's arrangement of the 2big's web-based dashboard is interesting. There are 11 main categories to browse—General Settings, Users, Shares, Network, and so forth—all of which are accessible from the main window. To the right and underneath are room for three tiles with a bit of expanded info. For example, the General Settings tile displays the date, time, and which network the 2big is connected to, while the Storage tile shows how much space is left. Overall, it’s pretty straightforward and easy to get where you’re going. You can’t dig as deep as you can with some of the other NAS boxes, though, nor does the 2big support third-party apps.
When the rubber hit the road, the 2big was never the fastest, though it typically came in second or third in most benchmarks. Read speeds are a bit on the slow side, and with DLNA enabled, it took nearly twice as long to copy VOB files from our client PC to the 2big. Performance improves somewhat by switching from RAID 1 to RAID 0, but so does the risk of losing data.
At $400 (both street and MSRP), the 2big is the most expensive of the two-bay boxes in this roundup. We’d be willing to overlook that if it could distance itself from the competition in some way, but with the limited connectivity options and middling performance, it’s a tough sell.
LaCie 2big NAS w/4TB
$399, www.lacie.com
QNAP TurboNAS TS-470
Your storage concierge awaits
We’ll be the first to admit that it’s not fair to put a $1,000 NAS in the ring with units that cost anywhere from a third to two-thirds the price, but we can only review what’s sent to us, and this is it. So, what does a grand get you in NAS-box world?
Turns out it’s just about everything save for the kitchen sink. Oh, and storage. If you’re insulted by the price tag, QNAP adds injury by neglecting to include any hard drives, putting further hurt on your wallet. Hey, at least HDD storage is still fairly cheap these days.
To be fair, the TS-470 isn’t just a simple backup device by any means. It’s more of a home-networking and storage concierge that’s ready to do almost anything you ask of it short of cooking you dinner—but give it time and there might be app for that, too. But before we talk about apps, let’s have a look at the hardware.
The TS-470 isn’t swinging an ARM chip like the rest of the NAS appliances; it’s rocking a 2.6GHz dual-core Intel x86 CPU and 2GB of RAM. It sports four bays, and can expand to a whopping 36 hard drives and 144TB of raw capacity when paired with a couple of dedicated expansion enclosures. There are two 1-Gigabit LAN ports, courtesy of the included PCIe NIC, though you can swap it out for a 10-Gigabit LAN card. You also get two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports (one on the front), two eSATA ports, an HDMI port, both an audio input and output, a Kensington lock, and a built-in infrared receiver for MCE remote control.
On the front is a backlit LCD panel that you control using Enter and Select buttons. You can change certain settings, though not nearly as many as with the web-based UI. Also on the front are power and one-touch copy buttons.
QNAP doesn’t use toolless caddies (boo!) though the drive bays do lock in place (yay!). Depending on the number of drives you install, your configuration options include single disk, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10, and RAID 5 + Hot Spare. The way RAID 5 + Hot Spare works is one disk is reserved as a spare and used to rebuild the RAID 5 array on the fly if a disk goes bad.
As you probably surmised from the port selection, the TS-470 has plenty of multimedia mojo. It even supports USB-based TV tuners, though that barely scratches the surface. Dozens of apps exist, including one that emulates Super Mario Bros., in case you’re in a nostalgic mood. But it’s not all about fun and games—Dropbox is available, and there’s an entire category of “Business” apps.
Though there’s a dizzying amount of options and functionality to play with, QNAP does an excellent job of presenting it all in a way that doesn’t feel daunting. The browser-based UI looks like a typical smartphone or tablet screen, with colorful icons for easy navigation. The Control Panel is where you’ll find all the knobs and dials, though it’s set up in a way that will never make you feel lost.
The TS-470 isn’t just the most flexible NAS box in this roundup, it’s also the fastest. It led the way or tied for first in all but two benchmarks, and made a mockery of the competition in our write tests. Surprisingly, the TS-470’s superior hardware wasn’t enough to offset the performance impact of enabling DLNA, but it did deal with it better than the others.
It’s a shame QNAP doesn’t include any storage for the asking price, as that’s all that holds us back from giving the TS-470 a Kick-Ass award.
QNAP TurboNAS TS-470
$1000, www.qnap.com
Performance
Speed does actually matter
To evaluate the performance of each NAS box, we used the drives that each one shipped with, save for QNAP’s empty TS-470, which we populated with four Western Digital 2TB Red NAS drives. The real challenge was figuring out which RAID to use, and in the end, we benchmarked each NAS box using RAID 0 and RAID 1. We also repeated each test with DLNA enabled, to see what kind of performance impact it would have.
We used a combination of synthetic and real-world benchmarks to evaluate performance. On the synthetic side, we ran CrystalDiskMark’s sequential read/write tests and 4K read/write tests. We also used an older version of ATTO (the newest release doesn’t recognize network drives) and plucked the highest read and write scores from each run. For our real-world tests, we recorded how long it took to transfer 1GB of music files from our test PC to NAS and from NAS back to the PC, and then repeated the tests using 3GB VOB files.
Due to space constraints, the scores you see in the benchmark chart represent RAID 1 performance with DLNA disabled, though we looked at the overall picture and considered all scores when evaluating and issuing a verdict for each one. In doing so, the QNAP TS-470 stood out as the clear winner among the bunch. Not only is its feature-set a country mile long, it consistently outpaced all the other NAS boxes in our benchmarks (both synthetic and real-world), sometimes by a wide margin. Its write performance was particularly impressive—measured with ATTO, the TS-470 posted 113.74MB/s, well ahead of Netgear’s ReadyNAS RN102, which was a distant second with a score of 80.14MB/s. The TS-470 needed to run circles around the competition to justify its pricing premium—it’s $1,000 for the box alone—and it did that throughout the majority of testing.
It was far more difficult determining a second-place finisher. Strictly by the numbers, LaCie’s 2big NAS came in second place more times than any other NAS box, but it also posted some disturbingly low scores and took last place in ATTO’s read and write runs. Plus, it’s the most expensive two-bay NAS box represented here and has limited connectivity options, to boot.
If all you’re looking for is a cheap way to back up your data, it’s hard to ignore Buffalo’s LinkStation 420. It runs about $250 street for 2TB, or you can double up to 4TB for around $300, which, quite frankly, would be the better buy. Either way, it’s a relatively cheap and serviceable solution for your backup chores, just don’t expect it to impress with a list of tricks it never learned.
In our minds, second place is a toss-up between Netgear’s ReadyNAS RN102 and Western Digital’s My Cloud EX4. The EX4 has twice as many drive bays (four), a sleek UI, and a great balance of features that home consumers and business users alike will appreciate. It’s also a little sluggish, posting scores that qualify for fourth or fifth place finishes in seven out of 10 tests. By comparison, Netgear’s ReadyNAS RN102 took first or second place in five of the 10 tests. It’s simply the faster box, and while it doesn’t offer business-class amenities like dual LAN ports and multiple power ports, it makes up for it with a wide selection of software options (including a growing app store) and RAID configurations, a healthy selection of ports, and metal construction, for less than half the price of WD’s My Cloud EX4. If forced at gunpoint to choose between the two, we’d ask the gunman why he’s so passionate about NAS boxes, and then we’d tell him to pick up Netgear’s ReadyNAS RN102.
Benchmarks
We connected the NAS boxes to an Asus RT-AC66U router and ran benchmarks on a wired client PC consisting of an Intel Core i7-930 processor, Asus P6X38D Premium motherboard, 4GB DDR3/1333 RAM, 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, AMD Radeon HD 5840 graphics card, and 64-bit Windows 8.1.
Spec Off
The Big Chart of Specs
The Pricier QNAP TS-470 features every port you'd want on a NASChoosing a NAS box can be difficult. The first order of business is to decide how many drive bays you need, both now and in the future. This affects both the potential storage capacity and your RAID options—for example, RAID 5 requires at least three disks. More drive bays typically translate into a higher price tag, too.
We also feel it’s important to pay attention to the CPU and RAM combo. QNAP’s TurboNAS TS-470 is the only one that brought an x86 Intel dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM to the NAS party—every other box wields an ARM-based Marvell Armada 300 series single-core SoC and either 256MB or 512MB of RAM.
Both the Buffalo LinkStation 420 and LaCie 2big NAS sport a single USB 2.0 port, the latter of which also has an eSATA connector. That’s about as bare-bones as it gets. QNAP’s TurboNAS TS-470 and Netgear’s ReadyNAS RN102 offer the most connectivity options, which is something to consider if you plan on attaching external storage or a USB printer. The QNAP TurboNAS TS-470 is especially well equipped for connecting devices—it has an HDMI port, dual LAN ports and power connectors, and even audio ports. It’s also the only NAS box in our roundup that’s 10-Gigabit ready—you can swap out its NIC for one with 10-Gigabit connectivity.
Benchmarks
More...
There’s nothing quite like having a system fail and then realizing you hadn't backed up your data. In the back of your mind, you always knew this day might come, but procrastination and poor planning has caught you with your pants down, and you have no one to blame but yourself. “Never again!” you shout, but as your anger eventually subsides, so does your impetus to do something about it.
You don’t have to be that guy. A little wherewithal, a minor amount of planning, and a network-attached storage (NAS) storage appliance will give you peace of mind—and keep your data safe. Owning a NAS box is an excellent way to keep your files organized, backed up, and readily available not just from your own PC, but over your entire network. That includes connected devices such as your smartphone, tablet, game console, and who knows, maybe even your toaster by the time you read this.
We’ve rounded up a collection of five multi-bay NAS boxes, one each from Western Digital, QNAP, Buffalo, Netgear, and LaCie. Each one will happily back up your data to multiple hard drives configured in various levels of RAID, but they’re also capable of much more. We’ll evaluate how easy (or difficult) each one is to set up and use, how they perform, and what kinds of special or unique functionalities they bring to the table, beyond simple storage chores. Put the kids to bed, folks, things are about to get NASty!
Getting to Know NAS
A primer on NAS and how it can benefit you
Let’s be honest: The topic of backing up storage isn’t particularly sexy or glamorous, though it is essential. At some point or another, your current storage device will fail; when it does, will you be prepared? Without a backup in place, you can kiss those vacation photos and home videos of junior taking his first steps goodbye. Once you’ve gotten over the emotional trauma and guilt of having lost all those digitally preserved memories, you can begin thinking of a way to tell your boss that the report you were working on for that multi-million-dollar client is going to be late—very late. There goes that promotion!
One way to avoid these situations is to back up your data to a NAS appliance. In its most basic form, a NAS is any storage device attached to your network that you can access from other PCs and connected devices, hence the reason it’s called “network-attached storage.” It’s your own personal server—your own cloud, if you will—that’s responsible for storing and sharing files. A NAS box is especially handy if you have multiple connected devices in your home, including mobile gadgets like smartphones and tablets.
Not everyone will benefit the in same way from a NAS box. For example, if you only have one or two PCs in your home and don’t care about backing up data from or streaming to other devices, a hard drive or even a USB flash drive connected to your router’s USB port might be all you need. However, you’ll miss out on the other benefits NAS boxes offer, one of the most important of which is redundancy. A basic feature of any multi-bay NAS box is RAID (Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks) support. Depending on the level of RAID you select, if one of the drives in a multi-bay NAS appliance fails, your data remains safe. You’ll want to replace the faulty drive as soon as possible, but unlike relying on a single drive—whether it’s connected to a router or as a storage partition on your system’s internal hard drive or solid-state drive—your backed-up files don’t enter the digital afterlife if a drive gives up the ghost.
There are distinct advantages to using an in-home NAS box versus trusting your data to a third-party cloud provider, too. For one, you don’t have to worry about subscription fees. Even though some cloud-storage options are free, they’re typically capped and limited in functionality. On top of that, you can’t always be sure a free service will remain that way—SugarSync, for example, recently transitioned to a paid-only service. NAS boxes come with an up-front cost, but you own the hardware.
We’d also be remiss to ignore the elephant in the room. The more we learn about our government’s spying tactics, the less likely it seems we can totally avoid the watchful eye of Big Brother, though that doesn’t mean we have to make it overly easy for Uncle Sam to sneak a peek at our files. Anything sent over the Internet is susceptible to spying, not to mention how much cooperation—forced or otherwise—a third-party cloud provider is offering up. It’s not just the government, either—hackers can make off with your data and your credit card details by breaking into a cloud provider’s database. To top it off, access to your backed-up data in the cloud is reliant on both your ISP and your cloud provider; if there’s an outage on either end, you won’t have access to that data.
In short, there are a number of benefits to owning a multi-bay NAS box, but how do you choose one? The answer to that question really depends on how much functionality you want for your dollar. Performance also comes into play. In our experience, machines with bigger, faster processors perform better and are more responsive. There’s a lot of overhead to deal with, plus the fact that today’s NAS boxes are smarter and more capable than ever.
One final word about NAS setup: For irreplaceable files and other important data, you should still maintain a separate, off-site backup in case of a fire, flood, or other disaster.
R.I.P. Windows Home Server
We were disappointed when Microsoft decided to discontinue its Windows Home Server OS—it worked wonderfully with other Windows products—though, truth be told, Redmond had already stuck a fork in the software by removing its nifty drive-extender technology from WHS 2011, the last version ever available. The drive-extender function was groovy because it allowed users to add, upgrade, and replace HDDs without losing their data. For example, if a user was running out of storage space on a setup containing four 1TB hard drives, he could swap out one of the drives and replace it with a 3TB HDD without skipping a beat.
All of the major OEMs have abandoned the now-dead Windows Home Server 2011 OS.Buffalo LinkStation 420
Out of the five NAS boxes represented in this roundup, Buffalo’s LinkStation 420 is the least expensive. It costs around $300 (street) for a unit prepopulated with 4TB of storage, which is how it was sent to us. Other storage capacities include 2TB, 6TB, and 8TB, or you can opt for a diskless version (421e) for around $120 if you already own hard drives.
Buffalo attempts to win over consumers by claiming transfer speeds of up to 100MB/s, and in some instances, you’ll hit and even surpass the century mark. The LinkStation 420 especially excels at small file transfers, though performance depends on how you have it configured. Out of the box, Buffalo defaults to RAID 0. This type of RAID doesn’t offer any redundancy and instead splits data across multiple disks for faster throughput. The major downside to this approach is that if one of the drives fails, you lose all your data. In a RAID 1 array, your data is duplicated across both drives and is still retrievable if one of the drives bites the dust.
Surprisingly, switching to a RAID 1 configuration didn’t have a big impact on performance (though the task of switching RAID modes takes several hours to complete). Transferring 1GB of music files from our test bed to the LinkStation took 25 seconds when configured in RAID 0, and 27 seconds in RAID 1. That’s how it played out across the board: only minor performance hits, both in real-world and synthetic benchmarking.
While the RAID configuration didn’t have much of an impact on performance, turning on DLNA did. With DLNA streaming enabled, it took over half a minute longer to copy a 3GB collection of VOB files to the LinkStation versus disabling the streaming service. We suspect that the combination of a 1.2GHz single-core ARM processor and 512MB of RAM is like asking the LinkStation to chew bubble gum and walk at full speed at the same time, so it gets tripped up trying to do both.
Navigating the web interface is pretty straightforward, in part because the LinkStation lacks some of the advanced features found on higher-end (and higher-priced) NAS appliances. Whereas QNAP takes a kitchen sink approach with the TurboNAS TS-470, Buffalo sits way on the other side of the spectrum with a NAS box that offers users little more than the basics. There’s no app support either, so what you see is what you get.
Buffalo’s interface is sparse because there’s not a ton of options to play around with.As a basic backup solution, the LinkStation is an attractive bargain. The big upside is you’re not being forced to pay a premium for additional features you may never use or care about, though if you want more from a NAS appliance than simple backups, you’ll need to pony up for a higher-priced alternative with more bells and whistles.
Buffalo LinkStation 420 w/4TB
$300 (street),www.lacie.com
WD My Cloud EX4
A business-savvy box that’s consumer-friendly, too
Western Digital infused the My Cloud EX4 with features that will appeal to both home consumers and small-business owners alike. This means home consumers won’t have to buy a brand-new NAS if their needs grow down the line, while business users have a relatively affordable option that’s easy to use. For example, most home consumers won’t give two spits about the dual LAN ports, but with link aggregation and failover support, a business user can tap into the two ports for additional performance or as protection against a downed connection or cable. If a connection fails for any reason, the EX4 switches to the other connection without skipping a beat. The same goes for the redundant DC power connections on the back of the box, though WD only provides a single external power supply—you’ll have to buy a second one if you’re concerned about it going bad, or as a precaution against little Billy tripping over the power cord.
The EX4’s cloud-based GUI is the sleekest of the bunch and extremely user-friendly. That’s to say you don’t need to be a total networking nerd to navigate the interface and configure tasks like automatic backups, though if you want to dive a little deeper into your LAN, you’ll find a spattering of fine-grain tools to play around with. Many options are accompanied by an information box with brief explanations of their functions. These range from mildly helpful to insultingly obvious—in the Network UPS section, the help box offers clarification on Master and Slave models (that’s helpful), whereas the help box next to the On/Off switch for the WebDAV Service simply states “Enable or disable the WebDAV service” without explaining what it is or does (gee, thanks!).
The EX4 is a four-bay box with support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10, along with spanning and JBOD. Our unit came with 8TB of storage spread across four 2TB WD Red NAS drives spinning at 5400 RPM; it’s also offered in 12TB and 16TB capacities, or sans HDDs if you want to bring your own to the NAS party. A nice convenience of the EX4 is that drives pop right in—no screwdriver needed. Perhaps too convenient, however, are the lack of drive locks. If little Billy isn’t tripping over the power cord, he could still wreak havoc by yanking out a drive and hiding it somewhere in the house.
We tested the EX4 in RAID 5, RAID 1, and RAID 0 modes, though changing it up didn’t seem to impact performance all that much. In our file transfer tests, the EX4 generally lagged behind the competition whether we were dealing with smaller sized files or larger VOB files. This was especially disappointing in RAID 0—given the nominal gains in performance, it’s just not worth the added risk of data loss versus running RAID 1 or RAID 5.
Enabling DLNA also proved a burden for the EX4, which is something we witnessed to some extent on every NAS box tested here. The good news for WD is that the impact was fairly minor on our real-world tests, though the EX4 was one of the slower-performing boxes to begin with.
So, where does leave us? First and foremost, it leaves us wishing the EX4 had a little more pep in its step, which would make it a clear favorite. However, what it lacks in sheer speed it makes up for in features and ease-of-use. If you can live with slower transfers, the EX4 is a fantastic buy for both home and business users.
WD My Cloud EX4 w/8TB
$750 www.wd.com
Netgear ReadyNAS RN102
Fast and compact
If there’s one company we thought might have a leg up in this competition, it’s Netgear, which has spoiled us with its high-performance wireless routers like the WNDR4500 and R7000 (otherwise known as the Nighthawk). The difference here is those are both top-shelf models, whereas the RN102 is part of the entry-level 100 series in the ReadyNAS product line released last year.
Some of Netgear’s NAS boxes are a bit complicated for the average user, so with the ReadyNAS line, the company went back to the drawing board and rebuilt its Linux-based platform from the ground up. The result is ReadyNAS OS 6, a clean and open platform that looks slightly unfinished.
Powering the RN102 is a 1.6GHz single-core ARM-based Marvell Armada 370 processor and 512MB of RAM, the exact same combination Buffalo chose for its LinkStation 420. Both are compact boxes with two drive bays, though Netgear’s carries a slightly larger footprint (3.97x5.59x8.66 inches versus 3.43x5.02x8.07 inches). Nevertheless, the RN102 can be tucked discretely away under the bed or in the corner of a closet. It also offers more connectivity options than the LinkStation—two USB 3.0 ports, a USB 2.0 port, eSATA, and a Kensington lock, compared to just a lonely USB 2.0 port.
With a street price of around $340, the RN102 is wedged between Buffalo’s LinkStation and LaCie’s 2big NAS boxes, which sell on the street for around $250 and $400, respectively. Why not go for the cheapest of the bunch and call it a day? In addition to having more connectivity options than the LinkStation, Netgear’s NAS box is made with metal instead of plastic. We didn’t have the same nervousness yanking drives out of the toolless caddies in the RN102, whereas the LinkStation’s plastic pull-tabs feel chintzy in comparison.
The RN102 supports up to 8TB. Our system came stuffed with a pair of Toshiba 1TB hard drives (7,200rpm, 32MB cache). By default, the RN102 configures itself in RAID 1 with Netgear’s proprietary X-RAID technology, a single-volume architecture that allows you to add storage space without reformatting your drives. Toggling out of X-RAID gives you the option of choosing other configurations—RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10, as well as JBOD. That’s a pretty robust range for an entry-level box.
We tested both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations. Performance was a mixed bag between the two, though generally fast at every turn. The RN102 approached or surpassed the 100MB/s mark in several tests and posted the highest read score in CrystalDiskMark. It also transferred large VOB files faster than both other two-bay NAS boxes. Unsurprisingly, enabling DLNA slowed things down a bit.
The RN102 is capable of more than simple file transfers—it also supports a small but growing number of apps. This isn’t so much a selling point as it is a bonus, at least until developers step to the plate with more app options. As it stands, there are just a handful, one of the more interesting ones being a surveillance app (ReadySurvelliance) that turns the RN102 into a Network Video Recorder (NVR). Using the app and an IP camera, of which there are over 1,000 supported models, you can keep tabs on your business or home remotely from your iPhone or Android smartphone.
Though Netgear markets the RN102 as an entry-level NAS appliance, it comes with a surprising amount of features and solid performance, to boot. Buffalo still has Netgear beat on price, but the RN102’s superior construction, flexibility, and performance makes it easier to recommend.
Netgear ReadyNAS RN102 w/2TB
$340 (street), www.netgear.com
LaCie 2big NAS
Small, stylish, and sturdy storage
It’s a bit ironic that LaCie continues to attach the “2big” moniker to this line of NAS appliances, a naming scheme that belies its compact design. But that doesn’t mean it will go unnoticed by visitors if you leave it out in the open. On the contrary, LaCie’s 2big NAS wins style points for its refreshingly unique design. Whereas most NAS boxes are pretty plain, the 2big NAS looks like a giant heatsink ripped out of an alien spaceship, with a glowing blue orb near the top that gives the box a bit of sci-fi flair. It’s also functional as a physical button and an indicator of drive health. Solid blue is what you want to see—it means everything is normal. A blinking blue LED indicates it’s busy with an activity, while blue and red blinking means it’s building a RAID array or updating its software. What you don’t want to see is a blinking red LED, which is a warning sign that something’s wrong (high temps or a degraded RAID array), and you really hope to avoid a solid red LED, which indicates a critical error. You can disable the LED through software if you don’t care for the persistent mood lighting, especially if you plan to plop the 2big in your bedroom, but events triggering a red alert will still turn on the LED.
LaCie is the only company in this roundup to include several different power adapters. Most civilians won’t care, but if you rack up frequent flier miles like a kid collecting candy on Halloween, you can take the 2big almost anywhere in the world and still have an appropriate power cord to fire it up.
The 2big is yet another NAS box with a single-core ARM processor inside, though it’s clocked at 2GHz like WD’s entry. However, LaCie skimped on RAM, with just 256MB on board, the least amount of any NAS box reviewed here. Connectivity options are also a bit on the sparse side—there’s a single USB 2.0 port and an eSATA port, and of course, a Gigabit LAN to plug into your network. To LaCie’s credit, the 2big came with the longest Ethernet cable, giving users a bit more flexibility in terms of placement.
LaCie's arrangement of the 2big's web-based dashboard is interesting. There are 11 main categories to browse—General Settings, Users, Shares, Network, and so forth—all of which are accessible from the main window. To the right and underneath are room for three tiles with a bit of expanded info. For example, the General Settings tile displays the date, time, and which network the 2big is connected to, while the Storage tile shows how much space is left. Overall, it’s pretty straightforward and easy to get where you’re going. You can’t dig as deep as you can with some of the other NAS boxes, though, nor does the 2big support third-party apps.
When the rubber hit the road, the 2big was never the fastest, though it typically came in second or third in most benchmarks. Read speeds are a bit on the slow side, and with DLNA enabled, it took nearly twice as long to copy VOB files from our client PC to the 2big. Performance improves somewhat by switching from RAID 1 to RAID 0, but so does the risk of losing data.
At $400 (both street and MSRP), the 2big is the most expensive of the two-bay boxes in this roundup. We’d be willing to overlook that if it could distance itself from the competition in some way, but with the limited connectivity options and middling performance, it’s a tough sell.
LaCie 2big NAS w/4TB
$399, www.lacie.com
QNAP TurboNAS TS-470
Your storage concierge awaits
We’ll be the first to admit that it’s not fair to put a $1,000 NAS in the ring with units that cost anywhere from a third to two-thirds the price, but we can only review what’s sent to us, and this is it. So, what does a grand get you in NAS-box world?
Turns out it’s just about everything save for the kitchen sink. Oh, and storage. If you’re insulted by the price tag, QNAP adds injury by neglecting to include any hard drives, putting further hurt on your wallet. Hey, at least HDD storage is still fairly cheap these days.
To be fair, the TS-470 isn’t just a simple backup device by any means. It’s more of a home-networking and storage concierge that’s ready to do almost anything you ask of it short of cooking you dinner—but give it time and there might be app for that, too. But before we talk about apps, let’s have a look at the hardware.
The TS-470 isn’t swinging an ARM chip like the rest of the NAS appliances; it’s rocking a 2.6GHz dual-core Intel x86 CPU and 2GB of RAM. It sports four bays, and can expand to a whopping 36 hard drives and 144TB of raw capacity when paired with a couple of dedicated expansion enclosures. There are two 1-Gigabit LAN ports, courtesy of the included PCIe NIC, though you can swap it out for a 10-Gigabit LAN card. You also get two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports (one on the front), two eSATA ports, an HDMI port, both an audio input and output, a Kensington lock, and a built-in infrared receiver for MCE remote control.
On the front is a backlit LCD panel that you control using Enter and Select buttons. You can change certain settings, though not nearly as many as with the web-based UI. Also on the front are power and one-touch copy buttons.
QNAP doesn’t use toolless caddies (boo!) though the drive bays do lock in place (yay!). Depending on the number of drives you install, your configuration options include single disk, JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6, RAID 10, and RAID 5 + Hot Spare. The way RAID 5 + Hot Spare works is one disk is reserved as a spare and used to rebuild the RAID 5 array on the fly if a disk goes bad.
As you probably surmised from the port selection, the TS-470 has plenty of multimedia mojo. It even supports USB-based TV tuners, though that barely scratches the surface. Dozens of apps exist, including one that emulates Super Mario Bros., in case you’re in a nostalgic mood. But it’s not all about fun and games—Dropbox is available, and there’s an entire category of “Business” apps.
Though there’s a dizzying amount of options and functionality to play with, QNAP does an excellent job of presenting it all in a way that doesn’t feel daunting. The browser-based UI looks like a typical smartphone or tablet screen, with colorful icons for easy navigation. The Control Panel is where you’ll find all the knobs and dials, though it’s set up in a way that will never make you feel lost.
The TS-470 isn’t just the most flexible NAS box in this roundup, it’s also the fastest. It led the way or tied for first in all but two benchmarks, and made a mockery of the competition in our write tests. Surprisingly, the TS-470’s superior hardware wasn’t enough to offset the performance impact of enabling DLNA, but it did deal with it better than the others.
It’s a shame QNAP doesn’t include any storage for the asking price, as that’s all that holds us back from giving the TS-470 a Kick-Ass award.
QNAP TurboNAS TS-470
$1000, www.qnap.com
Performance
Speed does actually matter
To evaluate the performance of each NAS box, we used the drives that each one shipped with, save for QNAP’s empty TS-470, which we populated with four Western Digital 2TB Red NAS drives. The real challenge was figuring out which RAID to use, and in the end, we benchmarked each NAS box using RAID 0 and RAID 1. We also repeated each test with DLNA enabled, to see what kind of performance impact it would have.
We used a combination of synthetic and real-world benchmarks to evaluate performance. On the synthetic side, we ran CrystalDiskMark’s sequential read/write tests and 4K read/write tests. We also used an older version of ATTO (the newest release doesn’t recognize network drives) and plucked the highest read and write scores from each run. For our real-world tests, we recorded how long it took to transfer 1GB of music files from our test PC to NAS and from NAS back to the PC, and then repeated the tests using 3GB VOB files.
Due to space constraints, the scores you see in the benchmark chart represent RAID 1 performance with DLNA disabled, though we looked at the overall picture and considered all scores when evaluating and issuing a verdict for each one. In doing so, the QNAP TS-470 stood out as the clear winner among the bunch. Not only is its feature-set a country mile long, it consistently outpaced all the other NAS boxes in our benchmarks (both synthetic and real-world), sometimes by a wide margin. Its write performance was particularly impressive—measured with ATTO, the TS-470 posted 113.74MB/s, well ahead of Netgear’s ReadyNAS RN102, which was a distant second with a score of 80.14MB/s. The TS-470 needed to run circles around the competition to justify its pricing premium—it’s $1,000 for the box alone—and it did that throughout the majority of testing.
It was far more difficult determining a second-place finisher. Strictly by the numbers, LaCie’s 2big NAS came in second place more times than any other NAS box, but it also posted some disturbingly low scores and took last place in ATTO’s read and write runs. Plus, it’s the most expensive two-bay NAS box represented here and has limited connectivity options, to boot.
If all you’re looking for is a cheap way to back up your data, it’s hard to ignore Buffalo’s LinkStation 420. It runs about $250 street for 2TB, or you can double up to 4TB for around $300, which, quite frankly, would be the better buy. Either way, it’s a relatively cheap and serviceable solution for your backup chores, just don’t expect it to impress with a list of tricks it never learned.
In our minds, second place is a toss-up between Netgear’s ReadyNAS RN102 and Western Digital’s My Cloud EX4. The EX4 has twice as many drive bays (four), a sleek UI, and a great balance of features that home consumers and business users alike will appreciate. It’s also a little sluggish, posting scores that qualify for fourth or fifth place finishes in seven out of 10 tests. By comparison, Netgear’s ReadyNAS RN102 took first or second place in five of the 10 tests. It’s simply the faster box, and while it doesn’t offer business-class amenities like dual LAN ports and multiple power ports, it makes up for it with a wide selection of software options (including a growing app store) and RAID configurations, a healthy selection of ports, and metal construction, for less than half the price of WD’s My Cloud EX4. If forced at gunpoint to choose between the two, we’d ask the gunman why he’s so passionate about NAS boxes, and then we’d tell him to pick up Netgear’s ReadyNAS RN102.
Benchmarks
| Buffalo LinkStation 420 | WD My Cloud EX4 | QNAP TurboNAS TS-470 | Netgear ReadyNAS RN102 | LaCie 2big NAS | |
| CrystalDiskMark Sequential Read (MB/s) | 64.77 | 72.86 | 75.04 | 106.2 | 74.82 |
| CrystalDiskMark Sequential Write (MB/s) | 72.98 | 69.68 | 110.6 | 47.43 | 72.90 |
| CrystalDiskMark 4K Read (MB/s) | 9.69 | 6.76 | 10.73 | 6.71 | 10.18 |
| CrystalDiskMark 4K Write (MB/s) | 9.02 | 9.82 | 10.21 |
5.43 | 9.89 |
| ATTO Read (MB/s) | 113.98 | 115.95 | 117.47 | 102.52 | 84.14 |
| ATTO Write (MB/s) | 75.72 | 73.74 | 113.74 | 80.14 | 59.52 |
| 1GB Music files PC to NAS (sec) | 27 | 29 | 15 | 28 | 24 |
| 1GB Music files NAS to PC (sec) | 19 | 23 | 26 | 17 | 22 |
| 3GB VOB files PC to NAS (sec) | 59 | 69 | 30 | 56 | 66 |
| 3GB VOB files NAS to PC (sec) | 30 | 39 | 30 | 34 | 34 |
Spec Off
The Big Chart of Specs
The Pricier QNAP TS-470 features every port you'd want on a NASWe also feel it’s important to pay attention to the CPU and RAM combo. QNAP’s TurboNAS TS-470 is the only one that brought an x86 Intel dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM to the NAS party—every other box wields an ARM-based Marvell Armada 300 series single-core SoC and either 256MB or 512MB of RAM.
Both the Buffalo LinkStation 420 and LaCie 2big NAS sport a single USB 2.0 port, the latter of which also has an eSATA connector. That’s about as bare-bones as it gets. QNAP’s TurboNAS TS-470 and Netgear’s ReadyNAS RN102 offer the most connectivity options, which is something to consider if you plan on attaching external storage or a USB printer. The QNAP TurboNAS TS-470 is especially well equipped for connecting devices—it has an HDMI port, dual LAN ports and power connectors, and even audio ports. It’s also the only NAS box in our roundup that’s 10-Gigabit ready—you can swap out its NIC for one with 10-Gigabit connectivity.
Benchmarks
| WD My Cloud EX4 | QNAP TurboNAS TS-470 | Netgear ReadyNAS RN102 | LaCie 2big NAS | Buffalo LinkStation 420 | |
| CPU | 2GHz single-core ARM | 2.6GHz dual-core Intel | 1.2GHz single-core ARM | 2GHz single-core ARM | 1.2GHz single-core ARM |
| RAM | 512MB | 2GB | 512MB | 256MB | 512MB |
| Drive bays | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 2.5-inch support | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| OS | Linux | QTS 4.0 | ReadyNAS OS 6 | NAS OS 3 (Debian-based Linux) | Linux |
| Ethernet ports | 2 (Gigabit) | 4 (Gigabit); 10GbE-ready | 1 (Gigabit) | 1 (Gigabit) | 1 (Gigabit) |
| Expansion ports | 2x USB 3.0 | 2x USB 3.0, 3x USB 2.0 | 2x USB 3.0, 3x USB 2.0 | USB 2.0, eSATA | USB 2.0 |
| Kingston lock port | No | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| DLNA, VMware, etc. | DLNA, iTunes, Time Machine, CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFSv3, HTTP, FTP, P2P | DLNA, iTunes, Time Machine, AirPlay, VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V, CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFSv3, HTTP, FTP, P2P | DLNA, iTunes, Time Machine, VMWare, Citrix, Hyper-V, TiVO, UPnP, CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFSv3, HTTP, FTP | LNA, iTunes, Time Machine, VMWare, Citrix, Hyper-V, TiVO, UPnP, CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFSv3, HTTP, FTP | DLNA, iTunes, Time Machine, CIFS/SMB, AFP, HTTP, FTP, NFS, BitTorrent |
| RAID | 0, 1, 5, 10, Spanning, JBOD | 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 5 + Hot Spare, JBOD | 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, JBOD | 0, 1, JBOD | 0, 1 |
| HDMI | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Idle power consumption | 25 watts | 33 watts | 15 watts | 17 watts | 12 watts |
| Audio ports | No | 1 Input, 1 Output | No | No | No |
| Dimensions (W x H x D) |
6.30 x 8.21 x 8.67 inches | 7.09 x 6.97 x 9.25 inches | 3.97 x 5.59 x 8.66 inches | 3.5 x 7.8 x 6.7 inches | 3.43 x 5.02 x 8.07 inches |
| Jumbo frame support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Price | $750 | $1,000 (street) | $340 (street) | $399 (street) | $300 (street) |
| Verdict (restate) | 8 | 9 | 8 | 6 | 7 |
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