NAS GOALS
I needed a NAS that fulfilled the following
objectives in the following order of priority:
1.
The most
important thing to me is security.
Not only from the internet but from a physical perspective.
If the NAS was ever stolen or the hard driver were ever stolen I want the
volumes fully encrypted as my business data, and the privacy thereof, is the
most important to me.
2.
I need data reliability through raid and
replication.
3.
I need the NAS to be quiet as it is actually in
my office and not in some data closet somewhere in the office.
I need it to work in silence or near silence during the day as to not
disturb me or my clients.
4.
I need great performance.
I need the NAS to be as fast as possible so that it is like the remote
drive is as fast as my local hard drive.
5.
I need expandability through more drives.
6.
I need to be able to run applications on it that
are business oriented.
Why I chose the QNAP TS-470
1.
The two
NAS platforms I was considering were the QNAP and SYNOLOGY.
Being that encryption is my number one goal I wanted a NAS that had full
volume encryption. I wanted no part
of the hard drive unencrypted. QNAP
can do that. The last time I check
Synology only allows you to encrypt parts of the hard drive but not the whole
volume, therefore for the most important criteria on my list QNAP has the edge.
After working with the QNAP I can confirm the QNAP it is true full volume
encryption. The interesting part is
that the “default shares” which are created when you create your first volume
get encrypted too. That means when
you boot the NAS, if you choose like I have, that the volumes do not decrypt
themselves but wait for a password to be entered that has just sits there
waiting for the password. If you
wait long enough you get an error in the log saying “could not mount <x, y, z>
default shares>. As soon as you put
in the password the QNAP NAS mounts the shares and starts any services that were
dependent on those shares. Case in
point, I installed the Vtiger crm software using the Mysql database that came
with the QNAP NAS. If you browse to
the Vtiger web page on the NAS before putting in the password for the encrypted
volume where the SQL databases as well as the Vtiger files are located you get
nothing. Once you enter in the
password the MySQL and Vtiger services start.
The point is, QNAP understands that the whole NAS may be encrypted and
they have made allowances for it, put in the password and all of the services
are started properly. Whereas, my
impression of Synology is that some volumes cannot be encrypted that it relies
upon during the boot process. QNAP
has designed the NAS with security in mind and it works well.
2.
QNAP has all of the RAID options available and
you can buy a chassis whether desktop or rack mount with several bays and if
that is not enough you can expand to more external chassis.
I opted for mirrored volumes because my data requirements are SMALL.
My whole office data files are stored in about 15 gigs of data.
Doesn’t sound like a lot but when you consider most of that is word and
excel files,15 gigs of word and excel is a lot data.
Since my data requirements are small I went for the fastest, quietest
drives I could buy which leads into my number 3 requirement.
3.
Next I needed real time replication between my
offices so that if fire, flood, theft occurs I have a full offsite backup at my
second office. QNAP has several
options between rsync and real time replication.
4.
To keep the NAS as cool as possible to keep the
fan turning at the lowest speed and to keep the noise down I opted for SSD
drives. I bought Kingston Digital
480 GB SSDNow KC300 SATA 3 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive, and I bought them on
amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CLB4ATI/ref=oh_details_o03_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
since I only needed 15 gigs of space, 480gigs will give me plenty of room
for growth. Additionally, since I
am only mirroring two drives I have two slots left for more growth in the
future.
5.
In addition of the Kingston drives running cool
which keeps the heat down, they are the fastest drives you can put in a NAS.
The NAS itself allows you to install a SSD as a cache drive to increase
performance to your Hard Disk drives, but if you install them as the actual data
drives you get blazing write speeds.
6.
The TS-470 had 4 slots, I only needed two to do a
mirrored pair so I have expandability plus it has e-sata ports, USB3 ports and
USB2 ports and finally you can put an expansion card in to talk to more external
chassis. If I ever need to expand I
have lots of choices.
7.
The main app I currently need beyond file sharing
is a shared contact database. QNAP
doesn’t have just a contact database they have full CRM solutions where I am
only using 1/50th of the software by using the contacts portion but
it works well and is free.
GO TO:
Why did I upgrade?
GOTO:
You can see the
testing I did before I did the upgrade here