[frankdtank]

The age old question, which nas box to buy. I'm completely stuck on 2 devices so I figured a little advice's from the community might help. So, the 2 nas boxes I'm looking at are the drobo 5n and synology ds214+.

The reason I chose these devices are the manufacturers reputation and mysql support directly hosted on the nas. Below are some key points on each device.

Drobo, the good......
5 bays: Much higher storage capacity.
Ability to mix drive sizes.

Synology, the good.....
Exact specs known (Dual core CPU and 1 GB ram)
Connections: dual Ethernet, USB 3.0, etc.

Drobo, the bad.....
Smart raid, who knows how it will be configured?
No USB ports at all
Unknown specs

Synology, the bad.....
2 drive bays, obviously a huge disadvantage.

What to do, what to do! Thanks up front for any advice.

[Orbi]

Synology and others (QNAP) have models with 5 bays and more. The first question you need to ask yourself, is how much storage you think you're to need the next few years?

[frankdtank]

I already have a couple of 3 TB drives which are mirrored in my htpc and are only 1/3rd of the way full. I'd like to think it'll be a few years till I fill them up. I'm planning on getting rid of the PC now that I found the awesomness known as the raspberry pi. It just seems like overkill to have this huge computer to store 2 drives, not to mention it heats up the entire room its in.

[jznine]

I have a synology DS713+, can't speak exactly for the 214 in terms of similar performance etc, but the diskstation web interface is very nice for admin tasks and running the built in apps etc, particulary from offsite. I use two attached USB3 drives for weekly backups of the NAS. The 713 can add the optional 5 bay add-on unit if needed for more drives, but at current rates I am doing fine by just swapping in larger drives over time (currently 4TB). I wouldn't be comfortable running more than I could backup to USB etc, so I decided I didn't want to go too large.

[MrCrispy]

In a few years, you can upgrade drives to higher capacity ones and thus increase storage. e.g. I've gone thru replaceing some of the 500GB drives with 1.5 TB ones, then with 3TB, and soon you'll be able to get 5/6TB for same price.

[frankdtank]

Thanks for the great info everyone. So my next question is how much horsepower, ram and processor, do I need to run a SQL instance on the nas? A dual core processor and a gig or ram seems sufficient to me.

[jznine]

Thanks for the great info everyone. So my next question is how much horsepower, ram and processor, do I need to run a SQL instance on the nas? A dual core processor and a gig or ram seems sufficient to me.

That would seem to be about standard spec across most off-the-shelf NAS at that level at the moment. I am currently running MySQL to 3 xbmc on it, and some other apps managing downloads etc, and CPU rarely goes above 40%, and then only when its doing a process or backup. Streaming sits at about 1-4%. Memory was about 20% when just streaming, up to 80% once started adding more intensive apps, so I swapped it to 2GB eventually. Not sure about the difference between the cpus on the 214 and the 713.

I had a Readynas Duo before, with a single ARM cpu and 256MB but it was really slow for any tasks running on it.