This post is lengthy, but I'd imagine it will be of interest to a few
people, and I couldn't find these type of details all in one place, so I'm
offering up my research...
List poster Duff pointed me to Infant (www.infrant.com) as someone to look
at for my empty NAS chassis needs. I've since done considerable research on
what is out there, and Infant is the clear winner in this market of
$500-700, 4 drive, empty NAS Chassis. There isn't much else out there to
begin with. Buffalo is the name most people know in 2 and 4 drive NAS
devices to begin with, but they don't sell empty chassis. Theca's is the
other name that is gaining popularity.
Research has yielded that the Buffalo units, even the Pro models are very
basic, no frills devices. Buffalo does not appears to be aggressive their
keeping their devices up to date to support newer hard drive (since they
don't sell them w/o drives), or to increase performance. I have read a
number of tests where the Infrant just blows away the Buffalo in pure
performance. There seems to be very low QC with the Buffalo products, with a
lot of people getting stuff DOA.
The Thecus drives currently available use an Xscale processor that severely
hinders their performance. They have a fairly decent feature set otherwise.
Thecus has a new box, the N5200 which is just hitting market which is 5
drive and uses a Celeron M processor. This one should be a good performer,
but being that it's now 5 drive and using a laptop CPU, it's expected to
ring in at the $1000+ range, so it's in another category.
The Infrant boxes uses a RISC processor and offer more features then all the
others. They are linux based so they are pretty stable. Some key features
only Infrant offers are NFS and AFP support (everyone else offers SMB/CIFS
only), snapshotting, new beta code offers VLAN support and 750gig drive
support (but with only 682GiB due to kernel limitations (the full release
will offer full size availability). SSH access is scheduled to be added by
the end of the year. They also market these boxes to home users so they have
a slew of media features for music/video/picture use.
They offer 4 different boxes, but the firmware they use across those boxes
is identical, so if you go looking at the feature comparison on their
website, it's out of date. They all offer the same functionality. Where
they differ is form factor, # of USB ports, and physical design. The 1000S
rack mount model also has a slightly slower processor then the 3 cubes and
some extra memory which can be useful for heavy rsync operations. I've
learned that the speed difference is also determined by the board revisions.
I f you were to buy a new device today, you'd get a Rev B boar din the
600/X6, and a Rev NV board in the NV. The NV board is the fastest, so it's
the fastest box they make. The Rev B board is just slightly slower, but
this should mean the X6 and 600 are pretty much identical in speed.
Infrant also runs an extremely active forum (with active Infrant
employees/techs) on their website. They are very aggressive with keeping
their firmware up to date to support newer drives and increase performance
and they offer beta software to end-users to use at their own risk. As a
company in general, I have been very impressed. with what I've seen
considering they aren't selling very high dollar stuff ($2000-2200 with
4x500 drives is the most expensive it gets)
