Synology's CloudStation client is very buggy after recent updates (mine routinely crashes and hogs resources, others' experiences are here: http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewforum.php?f=194, especially looks bad on the client side). The company's response seems to be absent or aloof, data access seems to be at random risk. With that the company can only rely on sales to technologically unaware consumers. Such sales are driven by buzzwords and glitz in marketing. Here you go.
Not everyone has a huge amount of data to store. A 3/4 drive configuration is more than most people who aren't either photography addicts or ripping large numbers of movie disks need. A 2 drive RAID1 (for fault tolerance) is suitable for their use and is smaller and cheaper as a result. The single drive models are going after people who're currently using a USB drive. Putting it on the network makes it more convenient to use; as do the built in media server applications. These are very much value NASes which is why they're using 1 or 2 3.5" drives instead of 2 or 4 2.5" ones; a Haswell CPU or even an Atom is ruled out for the same reason.
When you want to maintain a history of backups, no matter how little, they stack up over time. The less space you have, the more shallow your history. Raid1 only gives 1/n space; Raid5 yields 1-1/n, which is much better.
Being able to buy smaller, cheaper drives for the same capacity is much more worthwhile, since you can't always trust HD manufacturing. That is, 4x3TB disks is much cheaper than 2x6TB and since consumption only grows over time, I'd figure you'd want something that is scalable and able to last you 5-10 years. If your data needs are so small that you don't need multiple drives, then perhaps an external drive, or cloud storage would be a better option -- but I don't know if that targets the heart of the NAS market.
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MrSpadge - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
I do not quite get it - what takes these personal cloud NAS units beyond the cloud?Mullasci - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
Marketing.whats_in_a_name - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
All the other good names are taken. Kinda like your choice of MrSpadge :)celestialbeing - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Is this a case of buying a NAS that comes with HDDs all pre-installed versus an empty box?jameskatt - Friday, January 9, 2015 - link
They are BEYOND THE CLOUD because you get to STORE YOUR CLOUD HARDWARE wherever you want yourself. You also get to manage the cloud yourself.vdidenko - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
Synology's CloudStation client is very buggy after recent updates (mine routinely crashes and hogs resources, others' experiences are here: http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewforum.php?f=194, especially looks bad on the client side). The company's response seems to be absent or aloof, data access seems to be at random risk. With that the company can only rely on sales to technologically unaware consumers. Such sales are driven by buzzwords and glitz in marketing. Here you go.synology_usa - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
Greetings vdidenkoThanks for your feedback; we would like to hear more about your input through our official communication channels found here
https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/contact_us
Thank you
Synology US Team
vol7ron - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
I don't understand limiting bays to 1 or 2. Raid5 requires 3 bays, if it can't do that, then what's the point?vol7ron - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
And what about low-powered Haswell?DanNeely - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Not everyone has a huge amount of data to store. A 3/4 drive configuration is more than most people who aren't either photography addicts or ripping large numbers of movie disks need. A 2 drive RAID1 (for fault tolerance) is suitable for their use and is smaller and cheaper as a result. The single drive models are going after people who're currently using a USB drive. Putting it on the network makes it more convenient to use; as do the built in media server applications. These are very much value NASes which is why they're using 1 or 2 3.5" drives instead of 2 or 4 2.5" ones; a Haswell CPU or even an Atom is ruled out for the same reason.vol7ron - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
When you want to maintain a history of backups, no matter how little, they stack up over time. The less space you have, the more shallow your history. Raid1 only gives 1/n space; Raid5 yields 1-1/n, which is much better.Being able to buy smaller, cheaper drives for the same capacity is much more worthwhile, since you can't always trust HD manufacturing. That is, 4x3TB disks is much cheaper than 2x6TB and since consumption only grows over time, I'd figure you'd want something that is scalable and able to last you 5-10 years. If your data needs are so small that you don't need multiple drives, then perhaps an external drive, or cloud storage would be a better option -- but I don't know if that targets the heart of the NAS market.
juhatus - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Ganesh, when are you reporting about the new AMD powered QNAP's? http://www.qnap.com/i/en/news/con_show.php?op=show...Im just wondering if I should swap my ts-451 order.. TVS-463 looks interesting.