Product review: 5 Raid 5 NAS (page 22: Conclusion)

Conclusion

Besides the Thecus N4100+ which we firmly suggest avoiding due to its performances, all of the others in this test each offer specific advantages suited to different uses.

The Thecus N5200BR Pro has many pluses as it has the highest performances, is the only one to take 5 hard drives and integrate a Gigabit switch, manages iSCSI, etc. It is therefore a sure value but the price is exorbitant. With the hard drives it will cost you more than a good PC, screen included! Moreover at this point, this is actually an interesting alternative. Some users prefer to create their own storage servers using a PC ; however, this requires a certain level of competence for starting up the server, even if some Linux distributions largely facilitate the task. In addition, a PC will always consume more power, be less compact, and potentially noisier than a NAS.

Synology and Qnap are neck and neck. The former has better performances in writing while the second is better in reading. Synology does have a definite advantage in terms of price which Qnap makes up for with its potential for evolution. The variety of functions is more or less equivalent with a slight advantage for Synology and its new firmware. Finally, Buffalo is a little behind. The product is satisfactory but doesn’t really shine in any area. With fewer possibilities, it’s the most adapted for a professional environment where the lack of certain functions will be less noticeable. We did however like the excellent quality/price ratio of the 1 TB entry level version. With the good deals that can be found (at times much less than 600€ taxes included), it offers by far the least inexpensive cost per gigabyte for this capacity.