john banks

Is the above a real product? So far, it seems that a cheap old PC can stuff my Gigabit network with file transfer speeds on large files (running SATA II RAID 0 on two 7200 RPM drives) up to the theoretical 125 megabytes per second of the network. Rather than leave a PC on all the time or wake on LAN for occasional use, is there a suitable gigabit NAS for low cost that I would expect to perform as well as a virtually worthless old PC? When I plugged a USB 2 external drive into a cheap gigabit switch that otherwise works great, the performance was considerably worse than the drive just plugged into the USB 2 port on the PC.

Springs

iTrader: (4)

Nas wise.. depends how much you want to spend..

The HP micro server is a good contender.. Most places offer it still with the £100 cash back which is provided by HP.

boomer

I am mid-way through setting up my MicroServer (for £120 after cash-back) - it arrived last week and a pair of 2TB Barracudas arrived today ready for RAID1-ing.

Dunno about throughput performance, but is is a VERY solid piece of kit so far

mb

LostUser

My Microserver is configured with 2 x 2TB disks combined in to one pool using the Stablebit Drivepool add-on.

I regularly see 100MB/s when reading and writing data to it from my PC

Graz

Put Lights Out Add-On on the server too and you can get it to shutdown after a period of inactivity, wake up on LAN, schedule awake/asleep times etc.

john banks

I realised that a £100 ex corporate small form factor PC we have (HP Elite 8000 with E8400, 6GB and 250GB 7200 RPM SATA with Windows 7 Professional and Gigabit ethernet) only uses about 29W at idle which probably isn't that much more than a typical server? It could be a good candidate to simply use as an always on server, it is usually left sleeping at 3-4W so that over a year simply leaving it on would only use 25W x 24 h x 365d = 219kWh or £22 extra on our present electricity deal, plus for much of the year this heat output will heat the room it is in very slightly and usefully.

Previous calculations I made were based on just taking the power of the PSU on our present PC we use as a server, I didn't realise how little some PCs use at idle.

Littleted

i have the Netgear duo 2 with 2 x 2tb drives, takes about 4 mins to TX a 5 gig film. it auto switches off at night and on in the morning.

Been running for 2 years without a sniff, all my devices see it and stream from it. The bigger pro ones are better and you can add more gadgets to it, Via the netgear forums community

tarmac terror

iTrader: (2)

I have a couple of QNAP NAS devices on my network at home, much as I like their small form factor, for expandability and flexibility I keep coming back to FreeNAS on legacy PC hardware with an overdose of RAM

I have not carried out any comparison of their sustained throughput, there is no discernible difference between them from a user perspective although having said that each is configured and used for its own purpose.