I had set up the family's old Dell PC as a jack of all trades storage server. However it's on the blink. So I'm looking to get a small 2-bay NAS device ~£100 mark without drives. Anyone have any recommendations?
I have seen the Thecus N2310 and the ZyXEL NSA325 are around that price range. Any others you would recommend?
I am not sure of the prices in Pounds but Synology is the brand I would recommend the most if you are going the bought NAS route.
It is the software that is provided with it that makes all the difference.
If you can stretch your budget I really recommend getting PC hardware and running your favorite version of NAS software. NAS hardware is pretty underpowered if you consider doing anything more than storage with it. For comparison, a Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 with an i3 and no hard drives is $230 on Amazon and less on sale. Some of the Synology NAS boxes are wayyyyy more than that.
The cheapest Synology is the DS214se which is just a bit outside of that £100 budget sadly.
Short of going used parts I'm pretty sure I would be stretching it to build a full PC for that as well :(
The only issue that's preventing me going for the Thecus was the poor reviews on Amazon so I'm leaning towards the ZyXEL in that case...
I cannot really help you further than suggesting forking out the extra 13 pounds.
I also have no knowledge of either Thecus or ZyXEL so have to take that with a grain of salt.
Good luck though :)
I have a synolgy ds213, and i had to rma it 3 times before getting one that functioned, just saying.
they tried saying it was my drives, and that they shipped a tested working unit.. bull shit plugged it in didn't even try to power up the drives. they did end up paying for all the shipping and did get me a working unit in the end.
/end rant.
Now that it does run it is nice, I wish i had gotten the dual core model however, because if you have a few users moving data to/from it it gets overloaded.
the software on it has a lot of features. id say save a bit more and pick one up. mine has been running 24/7 since they shipped me a working unit for over a year now.