Ignoring the fact that disks are a fortune at the moment, what key features do I need to consider for a home use NAS (likely to be 2 bay Synology 212+)?

Plenty of “green” HDDs available that use less power, and therefore usually slower. Will probably be mirrored so individual disc speed may be important? For a single user over a network I guess the disc speed won’t be the choke point. But if multiple clients need data from different parts of the disk then speed (or more likely seek times) are important?

Anything else I should consider?

ta.

I don’t think the speed of a HD will matter. Speed of HD will be around 100mbps, streaming will be about 2-20mb.

I tested mine with 4 iphones and 2 PC’s streaming different videos and it was perfect.

Think about:

No. clients that will access data simultaneously, and how much data they will transfer

How they will connect ( gigabit will shift a lot more data /sec than wireless)

Heat build up – some drives run hot, some, esp the green ones less so

Noise – if you are going to be sat next to the NAS then you want it to be quiet

i got 2 ‘eco’ WD 2TB discs for my 210j and it works fine. Watching films from it, accessing data 4 at a time is good also..not so slow for me.

in the dsm you can also set the fanspeed for quiet, cool or sth else but i forget what is is..

Thanks peeps. Green discs sound like the sensible option then.

Just need disc prices to come down now!

some of the low power quiet samsungs are good, you might want to consider smaller drives over the bigger ones if data loss is a concern.

e.g 2x1tb drives instead of 1x2tb drive, unless of course low power and noise are your priority.

there were a few deals on external hdd that you can pull the drive out of and put in your nas, will void your warranty on the drive though.

some of the 2gb external verbatims have the samsung drives