In the market for a NAS

[dude112]

Hello,

I'd like to buy a NAS simply to share my movies with my mediaplayers updtairs and downstairs through network.
Been researching and only see people recommending the expensive Synology/Qnap or building a server.
I like the idea of a NAS because it has low energy usage which is good since it's always on...

My question is. Should I get a nas by synology/qnap even though I don't need all the extra options those devices provide or will something from like Iomega work just as well?

 

[MindoverMaster]

I have a D-link DNS-320. I have 2 x 640GB drives in there in RAID1 (mirroring). It was recommended by a friend on here. I love it, low powered, whisper quiet after it goes to sleep. I have my printer connected to it, too. Can print on any system on the network.

 

[dude112]

The D-Link DNS 320 seems like a decent NAS for the price. It's 70 vs 165 euros between the D-Link and Synology 212j...

For my needs I think the D-link will do just fine. Thanks for the reply and tip.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Just passing the word.

Oh, and the webgui is simple to manage anything.

 

[dude112]

So I got the dns 320 with 2x2tb Samsung Green F4's.
I've got it setup as JBOD. But why is it saying the drives are only 3663.64GB? Shouldn't 4tb be 4096GB?

 

[MindoverMaster]

4TB to Mb: 32768

Manufactuers use MB (Megabyte), not Mb (Megabit)

My 1.5 TB dives has 1.36 Tb

 

[dude112]

The NAS detects the drives as 2x2000GB though only to say in volume info there is 3663.64GB. Tried converting terabits to bytes and all but none really add up to 3663.64 or even close to that. It's either 32.... or 39/40....

But I'm assuming this is normal? Loosing 300GB is quite a lot...

 

[Yami]

It's not a bits/bytes thing, it's because of how hard drive manufacturers measure their capacity. Despite that there are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte (and 1024KB in a MB, 1024MB in a GB, etc.), the manufacturers for simplicity's sake take it to mean 1000B in a KB (and 1000KB in a MB, 1000MB in a GB, etc.) when advertising the capacity of their drives. When you lose 24 bytes for every KB, you'll find it ends up being a fairly big loss (such as 150GB off every 2TB drive).
More detailed explanation on Wikipedia, including ratios of loss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Units_of_storage_capacity

There are other factors that decide what the final capacity of a drive is, such as manufacturing defects (which the drive accounts for) and what formatting regime you use (FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, or those used for Linux), among other things.

 

[dude112]

Ok that explaines it. Thanks for the info. At least I now know it's not a fault or something.
The drives are formated in ext3 btw.

 

[Yami]

The drives are formated in ext3 btw.

For thoroughness' sake I'mma point out you lose a bit more again when using ext3 since it's a journaling file system to it reserves some of the drive for the file journal.