QNAP Diskless System All-In-One NAS Server w/ iSCSI for SOHO & Home Users + 2TB Western Digital Red IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA Internal Hard Drive $270 + FS (Starts at 10AM PST)

Quote from jwong : I'd have to agree with it not being much of a deal. You're paying basically $160 for the NAS. For comparison, the deal on the ZyXEL NSA325 yesterday was $120 for a 1.6ghz 512MB with USB 3.0. QNAP is a more established NAS maker, but the performance is considerably worse than the ZyXEL.

Personally, I'd hold out for the Zyxel NSA320. It's always on sale somewhere for $70-$80. For saving 50% of the NSA325 you drop from a 1.6GHz processor to the 1.2GHz processor, but still keep the 512MB of RAM. Other than that, they appear to be identical in functionality.

(It googles "Zyxel NSA320" and clicks the "shopping" tab at the top... (or it gets the hose again)) Side note, Walmart is selling the NSA310 single disk unit for $65....

I just picked an NSA320 up for use at work as the NAS storage for a four node Oracle 11g cluster sandbox. Works fine for CIFS and NFS.

As to performance, today, I just finished copying a windows disk partition over to a raw image file using dd. I was getting 46MB/s throughput consistently. This is gig ethernet from source PC to dest NSA320 using normal (not jumbo) frames. That's reasonably good network throughput for a budget NAS and that's considering that you've got Oracle running on other systems hitting it via NFS at the same time.

75722915840 bytes (76 GB) copied, 1558.64 s, 48.6 MB/s
72460+0 records in
72460+0 records out
75979816960 bytes (76 GB) copied, 1563.66 s, 48.6 MB/s
72683+0 records in
72683+0 records out
76213649408 bytes (76 GB) copied, 1568.65 s, 48.6 MB/s
72924+0 records in
72924+0 records out
76466356224 bytes (76 GB) copied, 1573.64 s, 48.6 MB/s
73150+0 records in
73150+0 records out

Course I was beating the poor thing to death. Between Oracle on NFS shares and copying this file, the CPU pegged out at 100%. The NSA325 at 1.6GHz might have made a bit of a difference but at double the price.

Oh yes, lest we forget. Full Linux access via the Fonz Fun Plug software originally designed for the D-Link line of NAS's. Zyxel is even on board with this. You can install ffp via their German software site. NAS Central Zyxel NSA320 ffp wiki link [nas-central.org] No more booting of USB sticks to get the software installed. For the hardware and linux geeks out there, this unit has so many extra's to recommend it on top of being just a NAS. On the same NAS central site there's even a couple of links to the forums on getting Debian Squeezy installed on it, though you do need a $20 Serial USB cable to do it (no soldering, jumpers on the mother board). Not for the faint of heart, though.

Hopefully the above helped shed some light on what you can do with these little Zyxel's. No, she's not a BMW (won't do iSCSI ) but she'll hold her own in the corners.