Reviews relating to storage: memory sticks, hard drives, NAS devices, etc
In the first part of this review, we covered the DS119j hardware, how to install the operating system and some of the niceties of its power consumption. But at this point, you probably want to know what you can actually do with the thing. The short answer is: quite a lot. But—and this is crucial— not all at once. DSM? MY EXPERIMENTS WITH THE DS119j raised some doubt about what the three letters of the… Now read on…
We’re all having to run local area networks (LANs) these days. Back in the last century, our IT life tended to be based around our PC. Or maybe a pair of PCs, with the odd items of data initially being swapped between them via floppy disks. Techies call this Sneakernet. As the century wore to a close, we started joining our devices together. At first, using wire—Ethernet cable. But by the time laptops became ubiquitous,… Now read on…
The classic view sees a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device as something that sits quietly in the background delivering files across the network as required. There will be occasional updates to maintain security. That’s not, however, how the Taiwanese manufacturer QNAP views the NAS. As regular readers will know, I’ve been living with the QNAP TS-451 for about three years now. Thanks to the generosity of QNAP and of Western Digital who supplied the four… Now read on…
Since part 1, this TS-451 epic has been classified as Storage and Multimedia. But our discussion of the multimedia side of things has so far been restricted to feeding music, pictures and movies down the LAN into a variety of multimedia clients. Essentially that’s still Storage. But the TS-451 truly is a multimedia device. Even without a LAN, this box can sit in your living room wired HDMI-wise into your TV or (better still) projector… Now read on…
Almost an entire year has passed since part 4 of this review, which I concluded with “to be continued”. You deserve an explanation. The Yamaha RX-679 and the QNAP TS-451 were two bits of kit that turned out to be much more fascinating than I’d anticipated. I knew when I got started that each of these was going to be a serial story but I didn’t foresee that together they’d more or less take over… Now read on…
You can never have enough storage. My first hard drive, back in the early ’80s, was a Seagate ST-506, its massive capacity of 5MB (yes, that’s MEGAbytes) being a snip at around £3,500 in today’s money. My current MacBook Air hosts a solid state drive (SSD) that’s physically an eighth of the size and over 50,000 times the data capacity. But, as I say, you can never have enough storage. Wheel on the Toshiba Canvio… Now read on…
Japanese-owned Buffalo was an early pioneer of network-attached storage (NAS). You can always tell the pioneers, as the old industry joke has it, by the arrows in their backs—the arrows in this case having been fired by later arrivals to the NAS game, notably Synology and QNAP, two Taiwanese manufacturers that have been eating the Japanese company’s market share. Buffalo has recently been making a push to win back lost ground with updated versions of its… Now read on…
With the raw mechanics of RAID out of the way, we’re now ready to get some fun out of this QNAP TS-451 NAS. You’ll have realised by now that it’s a lot more than a chunk of 11TB of storage on my LAN. The daemons we talked about in part 1 can be set to work behind the scenes whipping up all kinds of magic. FOR THE PAST SEVERAL MONTHS the QNAP TS-451 has been working… Now read on…
Last time I talked about QNAP updates and promised to say more about the 6 GB Red drives that Western Digital has supplied to help me through this NAS Server review. The NAS updates have galloped forwards since then, and we’re now on a major update version of the QTS operating system, version 4.2. A lot has changed, including the look and feel, so some of the earlier screenshots I’ve included here are out of date. Luckily,… Now read on…
In the first part of this series I said something about the general use of network attached storage (NAS) devices and whinged a good deal about the problems of explaining the capabilities of one with as many tricks up its sleeve as the QNAP TS-451. But enough theorising: now it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get stuck in. Installation THE TS-451 ARRIVES as a bookshelf-sized white box with (most immediately noticeable) four drive… Now read on…
