NAS
Western Digital recently unveiled their first energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) HDDs for the retail channel. Today, the company is taking advantage of the same hardware platform with some tweaks in the firmware features to introduce the 16TB and 18TB WD Red Pro for SMB network-attached storage (NAS) units. Like the WD Gold 16TB and 18TB models, the new Red Pro drives are also based on conventional magnetic recording (CMR), with a 7200 RPM spindle speed, and recommended for use in NAS systems with up to 24 bays. Having learnt from the WD Red SMR fiasco, the company explicitly points out the suitability of the new drives for use in NAS systems adopting ZFS and other such modern file-systems, while also supporting stressful RAID array rebuilds...
QNAP Expands Thunderbolt NAS / DAS Lineup with TVS-x82T Series
QNAP recently held a product launch event in San Jose. The main announcement was the follow-up to their TVS-871T released late last year. The first generation Thunderbolt NAS came...
19 by Ganesh T S on 5/13/2016Best NASes: Q1 2016
Network-attached storage vendors do not usually follow a regular yearly cadence in updating their offerings. Releases for different market segments are spread throughout the year. That said, thanks to...
26 by Ganesh T S on 3/30/2016Thecus Announces Two New Rackmount NAS Servers
Thecus has introduced two new commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) rackmount enterprise-class NAS servers with 12 and 16 bays. They both run the latest version of Thecus's Linux-based OS. The systems...
2 by Anton Shilov on 3/7/2016ioSafe Launches BDR 515 Backup and Disaster Recovery Appliance
ioSafe's disaster-resistant storage devices are unique in the market. Yesterday, they introduced the latest member of their backup and data recovery (BDR) server lineup - the BDR 515. It...
2 by Anton Shilov on 2/4/2016New GIGABYTE Server Motherboards Show Xeon D Round 2
The Xeon D platform, as reviewed by Johan back in June, put together eight Broadwell cores, 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes, dual 10 Gbit Ethernet and USB/SATA control all into...
23 by Ian Cutress on 1/18/2016Seagate Introduces First 8 TB Hard Disk Drive for Consumer NAS Applications
Seagate Technology on Tuesday introduced its new breed of hard disk drives (HDDs) for network area storage (NAS) and RAID applications. The new family of NAS HDDs from Seagate...
38 by Anton Shilov on 1/12/2016Netgear Updates Networking Lineup at CES
Netgear's flagship router - the Nighthawk X8 (R8500) - was launched in October. At CES, Netgear took the opportunity to upgrade the Nighthawk X4 line. Interestingly, the original X4...
6 by Ganesh T S on 1/10/2016Synology Demonstrates RT1900ac 802.11ac Router at CES
Synology had organized the Synology 2016 Conference back in September 2015 to talk about their plans for the next couple of quarters. We had covered it in great detail...
17 by Ganesh T S on 1/10/2016QNAP at CES: A M.2 SSD NAS, Dual-Xeon ZFS NAS and More
At CES 2016, QNAP showed off what they had been introducing into the APAC market over the last three months. CES was used to make the North American market...
10 by Ganesh T S on 1/10/2016Asustor AS6204T Braswell NAS Review
Asustor is one of the recent entrants in the NAS market. Over the last couple of years, they have tried to play in the same space as QNAP and...
29 by Ganesh T S on 11/5/2015QNAP TS-451+ SOHO NAS Review
QNAP is one of the leading vendors in the COTS NAS (commercial off-the-shelf network attached storage) space. They have a wide variety of hardware platforms to choose from, ranging...
34 by Ganesh T S on 10/29/2015Behind The Scenes: Evaluating NAS Units with Solution-Based Benchmarks
Recently, I had the opportunity to visit a leading NAS vendor and provide some insights on how we evaluate NAS units. In particular, the talk dealt with the importance...
17 by Ganesh T S on 10/29/2015Western Digital My Cloud Mirror Gen 2 Review
Western Digital is well known to the average consumer as a hard drive manufacturer. By extension, it also opens up the network-attached storage (NAS) market to them. In 2014...
20 by Ganesh T S on 10/9/2015Synology Launches DSM 6.0 Long-Term Beta and New Hardware
We had the opportunity to attend the Synology 2016 Conference in San Francisco last month. The event gave us quite a bit of insight into what Synology has lined...
34 by Ganesh T S on 10/7/2015Synology's DS216play - A Transcoding NAS with ST Microelectronics STiH412
The Synology DS214play was one of the unique NAS units from Synology released last year. It used Intel's Evansport platform (the CE5300 Berryville set-top box (STB) platform re-launched for...
25 by Ganesh T S on 10/7/2015Netgear's New ReadyNAS 21x Models Go Quad-Core
We had covered Netgear's ReadyNAS 200 series launch at the 2015 CES. Based on a dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 SoC designed by Annapurna Labs, the ReadyNAS RN202 (2-bay) and RN204...
4 by Ganesh T S on 10/1/2015Netgear ReadyNAS RN202 2-bay NAS Review
NAS units with four bays present the best balance between cost and expandability for home consumers. However, with increasing hard drive sizes, two bays make the cut for many...
22 by Ganesh T S on 9/25/2015QNAP's TVS-871T - A 10G NAS with Thunderbolt 2
QNAP operates in SMB / SME NAS space and differentiates itself by providing consumers with plenty of choices when it comes to the hardware platform. Over the last year...
2 by Ganesh T S on 9/22/2015WD Red Pro 6 TB Review - High Performance NAS HDD Gets a Capacity Bump
Despite the increasing affordability of SSDs, hard drives continue to remain the storage medium of choice for applications where capacity and cost factors outweigh performance requirements. Specialty drives have...
62 by Ganesh T S on 9/7/2015Seagate Announces a Trio of 8TB Drives for Enterprise Applications
Seagate was the first hard drive vendor to launch a cost-effective 8TB hard drive. The Archive HDD v2 (ST8000AS0002) uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to drive up the areal...
14 by Ganesh T S on 9/1/2015