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This week I’m taking a look at a NAS from a company that I’ve been wanting to get hands on with for quite a while now. In the UK NAS markets, QNAP and Thecus are two of the top players, however there is another company that have just as much of a presence as those that I’ve just mentioned – this is of course Synology.
Formed in 2000 by two ex-Microsoft employees – Cheen Liao and Philip Wong – Synology’s goal was to bring enterprise level NAS technologies down to an affordable price point for the small-to-medium business market and later on the small office / home office user as well. Whilst it took four years for Synology’s first NAS the DiskStation DS-101 to reach market, over the last nine years we have seen many solutions come to market under two main categories, DiskStation (DS for short) and RackStation (RS for Short) and in disk capacities varying from one bay solutions, right up to their biggest rack-mount unit which holds up to 12 hard drives for the biggest storage capacity that Synology can offer.
Before we delve into the in and outs of the DS213j that I’ve got to play with today, its worth noting the company’s very clever numbering system that to me is one of the easiest to understand out of those that I’ve seen in the past. using this NAS as an example, the model number is broken down into four parts. DS-2-13-j
The first part of the name is with DS or RS referring to either a DiskStation or a RackStation model with the first number that follows indicating how many bays the system holds – in this case 2. The second set of digits give us the year that the system was released, so 13 here refers to a release year of 2013. After that there is one of three options to be had. These are as follows:
‘+’ – this is the performance series of units offing the best features that Synology have to offer
the standard series is next and this has no digit after the year indicator – for example DS213 – these units offer a balance between price and performance
‘j’ – Units with a j in their model name are geared for the entry level user who’s focus is more on getting the largest capacity they can, whilst not worrying too much about the performance side of things.
With this all explained, its now easy to see, just from the model name ‘DS213j’ that we have an entry level 2-bay system that was built this year and comes as a desktop design – nice and easy to understand if I have to say so.
Class leading capacity, good pricing, along with ample performance ushers in the next generation of small form factor external storage from ADATA.
We’ve seen our share of hard drive docks and even a few from Vantec, but this time they have something a little different. The NexStar HDD Duplicator also does as its name implies, it can duplicate drives on a sector-by-sector basis. The beautiful part is that it can do it independently, without the need of being connected to a host PC. Therefore, no software is needed and it doesn’t really care what data or OS is on the drive. This makes for a very flexible tool which may appeal more to the techie crowd than the average user since not everyone has the need for drive duplication. Read on to see how it works!
If you are currently using a NAS server then you are definitely aware of the countless options available in the market as we speak from the low end single bay models designed for home use and up to the massive ultra-high end 24 bay models aimed at large businesses. What you may not be aware however is that no matter how good a NAS server is most if not all of these options come without any preinstalled drives in their bays and although some distributors take it upon themselves to equip them with their favorite drive models in the end the result is not what I’d call a plug and play AIO solution. Seagate is amongst the very few manufacturers that actually took steps to correct this by designing their very own NAS models and pairing them with their own drives in order to simplify the entire procedure and offer consumers the easy way out. Today we will be taking a look at the base model by Seagate the Business Storage 1-Bay 3TB.
Seagate's 4TB NAS HDD provides a direct competitor to the WD Red line from WD. We place them head-to-head to see which comes out on top.
In the world of flash storage, there is a multitude of big names on the playing field and for those who hold the highest reputations, they are either built on a long standing existence for example Sandisk and for some other vendors, the reputation they have built up from producing high quality products. Lexar is a company that in a sense falls into both categories and built as a spin-off company from Cirrus Logic in 1996, Lexar started off in developing flash controllers. Further down the line, Lexar was overtaken in ownership by Micron in 2006 and has since then been merged with Crucial as a subsidiary of Micron. Since then there has been a long line of flash storage products roll off the production line with the Lexar branding and moving forward to today we have the fastest and best looking flash drive that they have ever made.
The P10, as mentioned is quoted to be one of the fastest flash drives available to buy at this moment in time, offering up to 24x the performance of USB2.0 drives, The drive also features a sleek metal alloy body and come in capacities ranging from 16-64GB as it headlines Lexars USB flash drive lineup.
Who says you can never have enough storage. Well you really can not have too much. I myself have a few different computers around my house for different tasks, and I like to back them up and also share files over the network. External hard drives and enclosures are a great tool for keeping around your house or even on the go. There are so many different enclosures and NAS boxes on the market. Some do RAID, other’s do JBOD, some can hold only 1 drive and some can go up to 4 drives. Some of the cool things with the technology of the past few years is that we now have eSATA and USB 3.0. USB 3.0 offers up to 5 Gbps while eSATA offers less speed at around 3 Gbps. So today we will be reviewing the Vantec NexStar HX2R dual SATA Hard Drive Enclosure, so stick around and see if it would make a nice addition to your desk or office.
Need additional SATA 6Gbps storage connectivity for your PC? Then SilverStone has a low-cost solution for you to consider, and it includes RAID.
Vector 150 120GB comes with 128GB of NAND flash. Overprovisioning moves the user capacity down to 120GB, but steady state performance gets a boost.
The new WD Black in the 4TB capacity offers intensive 200 MB/s performance in the standard 3.5" form factor. Let's take a look.
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