<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">If you have the money, look at QNAP. But I'm with David, for the price and performance building your own is really the way to go. I'm curious if there is a noticeable difference in power consumption though. <div><br></div><div>-Will </div><div><br><div><div>On Aug 12, 2011, at 4:20 PM, David Champion wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">You would expect that, but some real-world testing of the cheap NAS boxes shows differently. They use really low-end Marvell imbedded chipsets.<br><br>You can buy a Dell T110 for about the same price as a soho NAS, sometimes cheaper. It has a "real" processor, a good Intel gigabit NIC, and can hold 4 SATA drives, and has an ESATA port. Put your favorite NAS type OS on it or even just a generic Linux distro, and it's going to beat the pants off a Netgear or Dlink NAS, and probably be more stable.<br> <br>Google for NAS benchmarks, there are several out there.<br><br>-dc<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Matthew Nuzum <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:newz@bearfruit.org">newz@bearfruit.org</a>></span> wrote:<br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im">On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Dave Hala Jr <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:dave@58ghz.net" target="_blank">dave@58ghz.net</a>></span> wrote:<br> <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I really doesn't appear that there is much differance between the<br> Readynas 1500 and the entry level Powervaults.<br> <br> My intent is virtualize about 6 servers and most likely launch the VM's<br> from a central location. They are mostly low-medium traffic webservers.<br> <br> I'm not against building a server, but ya know, if I can just buy one<br> and plug it in, that's not always a bad thing. I was hoping to stay<br> around the 1500-3k range. How many people actually build there own rack<br> servers anymore?<br><br></blockquote></div><div><br></div></div><div>I totally agree. I would expect that a GigE connection to a RAID array (with presumably fast seek times) should be able to approach an IDE drive's performance. I don't know much about these NAS's you're mentioning but I've seen a low cost consumer device that can NOT saturate the GigE port and seem to be bandwidth limited by internal architecture. (<$200 units)</div> <div><br></div><div>According to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Comparison_to_other_interfaces" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Comparison_to_other_interfaces</a> it suggests that IDE bandwidth just slightly exceeds 1Gb/s. Considering TCP/IP overhead that means you should probably expect slow-ide like performance at best. Probably not a great plan if your VMs need much i/o bandwidth. Fibre channel looks like a better choice if you can get it.</div> <div><br></div><div>I'll show my inexperience with this question: Is GigE 1Gb/s each way (total 2Gb/s) assuming you have a full duplex connection? If so then maybe IDE-like performance isn't unreasonable to expect.</div> <div><div></div><div class="h5"> <br>-- <br>Matthew Nuzum<br>newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter<br><br><div> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p><span>♫</span> You're never fully dressed without a smile! <span>♫</span></p><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><br> </div></div><br>_______________________________________________<br> Cialug mailing list<br> <a href="mailto:Cialug@cialug.org">Cialug@cialug.org</a><br> <a href="http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug" target="_blank">http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug</a><br> <br></blockquote></div><br> _______________________________________________<br>Cialug mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Cialug@cialug.org">Cialug@cialug.org</a><br>http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug<br></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>