With most of the world’s population having some form of digital device, the secure storage of their digital content is becoming of greater importance for everyday users. There are a lot of services which offer online storage of one’s data, however, many users are skeptical of how their data is being used on such platforms. Reading about data centers breaches is concerning and moves a lot of users to become more conscious of the potential risks associated with storing their data on a so-called “Cloud.” With the reduction in complexity of such services due to intuitive GUI managed software, many users are beginning to look towards personal data storage devices. Since most users have a mobile internet connection and want to be able to access their data from on the go, said data storage solution must be connected to the Network and be accessible via the Internet in a safe manner.

NAS

Asustor's Lockerstor 4, Synology's DS920+, and TerraMaster's F5-422.

With most of the world’s population having some form of digital device, the secure storage of their digital content is becoming of greater importance for everyday users. There are a lot of services which offer online storage of one’s data, however, many users are skeptical of how their data is being used on such platforms. Reading about data center breaches is concerning and moves a lot of users to become more conscious of the potential risks associated with storing their data on a so called “Clouds.” With the reduction in complexity of such services due to intuitive GUI managed software, many users are beginning to look towards personal data storage devices. Since most users have a mobile internet connection and want to be able to access their data from on the go, said data storage solution must be connected to the Network and be accessible via the Internet in a safe manner.

This is where so-called Network Attached Storage or NAS devices come into play. There are many such solutions available as an open sourced, free software package such as Nextcloud  or OwnCloud, however today we want to look at commercially available hardware and software.

I will be reviewing 3 sponsored NAS systems which I picked out due to their hardware and software configuration. This review is intended specifically for content creators such as photo / video editors or CAD users with a large and growing model database. As the latter is the case for me, I have decided to review affordable solutions to increase one’s network attached storage solutions and CAD productivity.

Nevertheless, whether you are looking for a NAS solution for your home or business scenario, or simply interested in reading about new networking hardware, my full review should be of interest to you as I will also be giving a general summary of each of the NAS’s capabilities and comparing them with each other.

The comparison includes the Lockerstor 4 AS6604T from Asustor, the DS920+ from Synology and the F5-422 from TerraMaster. Each NAS was carefully chosen for it’s capabilities of handling a steady stream of data transfer and enable working directly from the NAS in one’s CAD environment. For this, the NAS has to be equipped with a fast networking interface which is the case with 5GbE (link aggregation), 2GbE (link aggregation) and 10GbE respectively.

For a deeper understanding of what else is required to achieve such network throughput, see the next section with a review of the sponsored Switch and network adapters.

Seagate IronWolf HDD & 510 SSD and Samsung 860 Pro.

To use NAS systems to their full potential it is essential to use special Hard Disk Drives, or HDDs, which have been optimized for the NAS use-case and thus last longer than conventional HDDs before requiring replacement. Such drives have been designed to stay on 24/7, with minimal power drain. This makes them efficient and enables you to access your data on the go at any time. For this review Seagate  was kind enough to sponsor their IronWolf  HDD line-up which is specifically designed for this scenario. To read a short review about these HDDs visit here.

To speed things up a bit, Solid State Drives, or SSDs, are often integrated into the system. Due to their price tag, SSDs are often used to increase the read and write speeds of NAS systems by storing the most often accessed data on SSD cache. Storing all data on SSDs would be a lot more expensive, however, SSDs are getting a lot cheaper for larger capacities.

In this review NVMe M.2 2280 SSDs from Synology and Seagate where used to increase the read and write speeds by configuring SSD read and write caching. The 860 Pro where also sponsored by Samsung to test the SSD caching improvements for the TerraMaster F5-422 since it does not have M.2 SSD slots. Furthermore, the 860 PRO where also tested in a normal RAID 1 configuration to test increased speeds as a posted to HDDs. Check out the results and full review here.

Copyright © 2020 Other World Computing, Inc. & Copyright © 2020 Sonnet Technologies, Inc. & © Copyright 2020 TRENDnet, Inc. All rights reserved.

To achieve proper network throughput, the appropriate network configuration is required. Since one of the sponsored NAS systems supports 10Gb Ethernet, I decided to configure and test an affordable 10Gb networking solution for small businesses / home users. For this I chose a managed / smart switch with 8x RJ45 10Gb Ethernet ports from TRENDnet. To read more about why I chose this affordable 10GbE Switch check out my full review.

Most PCs / Laptops do not have integrated 10Gb networking capabilities, just as was the case for my computer. Therefore, I had to upgrade my setup to enable 10Gb Ethernet connectivity. For this I decided to go with a Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE adapter. One of the dominant companies in networking expansion for computers, SONNET, was kind enough to sponsor their Twin10G network adapter. Another company, OWC, also participated in this review by sponsoring their portable Solo 10G adapter.

To read more about these Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE check out the full review here.

DISCLAIMER! Not all advertised Ethernet cables are the same. The Ethernet cable configuration will limit the true transfer speed of your connection, so be sure to check this before buying the appropriate cable. You can check this here. Also note that most NAS manufacturers provide the appropriate network cable for their hardware.