QNAP TS-120 and TS-212P NAS review

OK, I haven't been blogging for a while. I've been just busy. However, today, I am going to resume and post about two QNAP NASes I've been using for the past 2 months. The 2 Bay QNAP TS-212P (pictured above left) and the single bay TS-120. I'm not going to go into a full review. I'm just going to jot my thoughts on using these two devices.

Now for a bit of a background. As many of my old readers know, I am a fan of home-grown systems; using FreeNAS and re-purposing Pogo Plug devices. Well, for the past year, my FreeNAS box has been at the office. At home, I'm a bit more energy conscious. I've been using various spare Linux boxes to act as SAMBA and TimeMachine shares. I've also used a few Pogo Plug in stock and ArchLinux form. However, my TimeMachine (TM) backups have been a bit flakey. Every other two or three weeks, I would get a corrupted TM image and would have to re-start. Furthermore, I had two pogoplugs fail on me. So when the QNAP went on sale during Christmas, I figure I'd give it a try.

I got the TS-120 for around $80 and the 2 bay TS-212p for $110. They are similar yet different. Both have Marvell 1.6 ghz CPUs with 512MB RAM. Both have a single USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports. Power consumption is very similar at 12/13 watts (5/6 watts sleep). The key difference is the single bay TS-120 has an eSATA connector. According to QNAP, the TS-120 is middle end and the TS-212p dual bay is an entry level model.

In terms of storage, I slapped a 3TB Seagate on the TS-120 and two 4TB Hitachis on the TS-212p. The TS-212p is running in a RAID mirror for redundancy. Both are similar in performance and capabilities.

Installation is straightforward. Screw in some drives, boot, update the firmware and access everything via a web base interface.

So what do I like about them? They're very much plug-n-play and zero hassle. It is kind of refreshing.
The browser interface acts like a pseudo operating system. In fact, QNAP does call it an OS. QTS 4.0. For a browser interface, it works surprisingly well within the limitations of HTML. You can drag-n-drop files and overal UI is well done for an HTML app. In fact, this works well with Chromebooks.

In addition, QNAP makes some fairly competent iOS and Android client apps to access the NAS.
Importantly, QNAP has a good repository of add-on applications.

You can install apps such as Squid Proxy server, WordPress, Node.js, Python, Plex, an USB web cam, etc. Pretty much, your useful standard open-source applications. Hence, you can turn your NAS into a variety of appliances from downloading bit-torrents, serving DLNA media, to a CMS application server. The capabilities are limited to the computing power of the specific QNAP device you are using. For example, I have Plex installed but neither devices are suitable for real-time transcoding. They serve h.264 MP4 media just fine to my iOS and Android devices but for 1080p MKVs, you'll want to look at the more advance QNAP models.

My needs are pretty simple. I wanted a simple TimeMachine box in addition to storing MP4 media files that I don't want running on the family Plex server.

For these two use cases, the QNAP boxes were fantastic. I even installed the CloudLink add-on which allows you to remotely access your NAS from the outside. Again, it was plug-n-play. There was no need to set-up port forwarding. The Cloud Link creates a tunnel link that allows you to access your NAS via Web browser or a mobile app. Sure, I had this before with ad-hoc set-ups using Pogos and open source cloud tools like OWNcloud/PyDIO. However, none of those solutions worked well. The iOS and Android app has one simple thing I like and that is searching. 

Something so simple yet profoundly compelling. Sure, connecting to a file server is trivial using CIF/SAMBA apps but the ability to search the file-system easily wasn't there. For example, open up ES File Explorer on my Android phone, mount a Samba mount, and I'd always have to browse folders; looking for what I needed. I normally, over-think things but this simple feature is a good reason for me to use QNAP.

There are some handy apps I want to mention real quick. You can set-up an Amazon S3/Glacier rsync. You can even rsync your Google Drive to a path on the NAS. The replication and synchronization tools are pretty good. I was able to set-up an schedule RSYNC to my FreeNAS box and it worked effortlessly. Thus, whatever is copied to my single bay QNAP, a duplicate copy is made in the background to my "real file server." You can even set-up one-touch USB drive copies. If you have an external USB drive, the NAS can easily synchronize to it whenever it is connected to its USB ports.

In terms of performance, it depends on your drives and network. I have a gigabit network and in comparison to my FreeNAS box, the QNAP was considerable slower with mix performances. The Seagate single bay TS-120 was pretty slow in terms of network copies in both AFP/SAMBA.

TS-120 Single Drive Seagate ST3000 3TB drive.

TS-212P w/ Mirror Hitachi 4TB drives

Overall, I'm not really expecting much in terms of performance. These are entry-tier devices. For Time Machine backups and accessing via my iPad, the performance is fine. However, I am genuinely curious about some of their small business models. I am seriously thinking about testing the soho models at my work for TimeMachine backups and RSYNC replication. I'm also seriously thinking about evaluating these for iSCSI vSphere application. 

Conclusion:

I like these devices. I really like the simplicity and ease-of-use. After a full week of work, I don't really want to think about tinkering around anymore on the weekends. I like how they just work for my needs. Between the two, it is a toss-up. I really like the eSATA port on the TS-120 but the TS-212p in a RAID mirror is more disaster-recovery friendly. If you are not sure, I suggest you try the low-end TS-120 if you can get one for $80 on sale. Who knows, you might get hooked. Thats what happened to me. I had no intention of replacing my other devices but the ease-of-use is pretty compelling. At first, I thought of just having a secondary TM back up on my network but now,I am thinking about the 4-6 bay models. I had no intention about getting hooked into a NAS eco-system but I am sure glad I tried.

Links: 

TS-120 https://www.qnap.com/i/en/product/model.php?II=102

TS-212p https://www.qnap.com/i/en/product/model.php?II=117

Upgrading the G-Drive G-Connect hard drive

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the G-Tech G-Connect iOS NAS drive. It is a 500GB 2.5" NAS that allows you to stream videos to iOS as well as act as a micro AFP file share / TimeMachine server. It has onboard ethernet as well as Wi-Fi built in. They routinely go on sale for $39.99 at Frys and I actually like them very, very much.  I am able to store files off my PLEX server that my kids can't view. AKA "Daddy files."

The issue with them is they only store 500GB.This device is discontinued and I wouldn't pay more than the $40 street price for these. However, they are pretty easy to crack open and you can easily replace the built in drive with a larger capacity drive.

I did just that with a 1TB Western Digital 2.5" blue drive.

The drive I replaced it with appears to be thicker. Possibly 9.5 mm height and the built in one may be 7.5 mm tall. With some work, I was able to manage the swap. I was concerned that Hitachi (who now owns G-Tech) may have added some special firmware that locks their devices to their own drives but that was not the case. I just attached the drive and formatted it as normal. Once booted, I was able to see it in the network.

Voila. 1TB available. These make good TimeMachine remote backups. $40 for the G-Connect and $60 for a 1TB 2.5" drive.

Bargain Bin Electronics: G-Tech G-Connect 500GB

Here at fortysomegeek's blog, I like to cover out-dated, overlooked last year's electronics. Here, today, I am going to discuss Hitachi owned G-Technology's G-Connect 500GB drive. This was introduced at $200 initially and was recently blown out at Fry's electronics for $39.99.

So what is it? It is a 2.5" small NAS wi-fi (or you can use ethernet) media server/drive for your iPad/iOS devices or (in some case Android). It can also be used as a bulky portable 2.5" external drive.When introduced, it got scathing reviews and sure, I would hate it at $200 or even $100. But at $40, it is pretty fly and let me explain.


I was at Fry's and Fry's had boxed OEM Western Digital 500GB 2.5" SATA drives for $50 and right next to it on the same shelf were these G-Tech drives for $10 less. I figure if I didn't like it, I'd yank out the drive and use the drive internally.

Now here are the gripes I've read in many previous reviews. First, it has no battery and must be wired. Hence, it is not portable like many of the other competing devices. Sure, this is very true but I don't intend to use it as a portable device but if I did, I can always power it via a USB adapter. It will power just fine as a USB drive connected to a laptop. Secondly, it is USB 2.0 instead of USB 3.0. Thus, you don't want to use this as a portable drive due to the speed and bulkiness. Lastly, the set-up is not intuitive. Hence, all these complaints are valid but again, I got this for $40. So those other reviews slamming this product must be taken into context. At $200, I agree them but at $40, the expectations are different.

So here are the ports. Ethernet, USB, Wi-Fi-Toggle and Power. If you connect it as a USB drive, the NAS function doesn't work. You can extend this device but adding another drive. It has two modes: NAS media server or portable USB drive. You can use this either on 10/100 Ethernet or Wi-Fi. As a NAS, it will act as a hotspot to serve only media.

This drive supports HFS+ and you can use it as a TimeMachine backup server. Again for $40, that is cool. It also supports iTunes and DLNA streaming. You can set up a folder, throw a bunch of movies into it and have it accessible via iTunes Share and/or DLNA. It also acts as a normal AppleTalk share file server. Not bad but not great. It isn't super fast but it gets the job done.

The mobile apps (iOS and Android) are very out-dated. It doesn't support iPhone 5(s) higher resolution so you will get cropped letter-boxing. The Android app crashes on every Android device I have so I can't comment. The iPad app works great as it appears to be the main focus. For Windows 8 and Android work-around, you can always use any DLNA client instead of the app to get your streaming fix. It will stream whatever your device supports. E.G. h2.64 mostly. WMV files won't stream to an iPad but I had not problems streaming to a Windows tablet or my Android phone. It works with ChromeBooks using HTML browser interface but the playback was choppy even connected to Ethernet.

Overall, the only complaint I have is the lack of multiple user login accounts. You are either admin or guest.

Now for my real reason for getting this device. I can easily re-produce all the functionality of this device around the house. My biggest usage is PLEX at home and the problem with PLEX is that it is advertised to anyone on my home network. My 6 year old can easily call up PLEX on his tablet, Chromebook, iOS device and watch any movies on his own. I wanted a private media server for my stuff which the kids don't have access to. So instead of setting up something completely new, this solved my problems. At $40, it was a no brainer. If I want something on it, I mount it as an Apple Share and copy files over or in rare situations, plug it in as a USB drive. I'll probably pick another one up when it goes back on sale again. The going price for this is $55-65 in the discount bin of most retailers.

Network File Browser front end for ChromeOS and Chromebooks

(Here, I am accessing my ArchLinux Pogo Plug ARM server via SFTP on my Chromebook)

One of the thing that the  Chromebook (ChromeOS) lacks is the ability to access local network share.
This isn't a glaring omission nor oversight on behalf of Google. As we know, they designed Chrome OS to be an Internet device that uses Google services. Chromebooks are designed and sold to access the public Internet.

However, if you are a home user who wants to access his local files on his local NAS or network file server, you are out of luck.  Maybe you are a school IT administrator who is also looking into deploying Chromebooks but want his school staff and students to access the local network file server.

Well, you can. Sort of. It requires building a front-end to your network shares using some popular open-source projects and this blog post will chronicle two of them:
Pydio (formerly AjaXplorer) and OwnCloud.

Both are PHP front ends that allow you to access file servers using just a web browser. Both have their plus and minuses. In short, you will need a LAMP stack box to act as the gateway to your file services. In other words, you'll need a Linux/OSX/Unix based web server to act as a middleman gateway. Think of them as mini, low-end consumer, small business asset management systems that works in the browser.

Read On.

This blog article will about these two projects with the idea of using them for Chromebooks. Sure, you can use them with any computer, browser but the point is to have a solution for Chromebook users to access their network file servers.

iPad / iPhone connect with FreeNAS (or any *NIX)

I've been asked how I connect an iOS device (iPad/iPhone) to a FreeNAS box. Well I'll answer that question in this post.

There are many apps in the app store that will allow you to connect to FreeNAS (or any NAS/*Nix) box and I'll share some of the apps I use.

Mounting and Remote Server File Access.

The main app I use to connect to a FreeNAS is Files Connect. I pretty much use it to connect to all my servers because it supports pretty much everything I need - CIF/SAMBA, AFP (Appletalk/Netatalk), and SFTP (SSH). It is a great AFP client for iOS!

It also supports the usual Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, FTP, and WebDAV.
I am able to copy files from and to the iPad/iPhone. I can transfer videos/photos from my camera roll to a network share. I can pull PDF and Photoshop .PSD files and view them remotely. I can pull in spreadsheets and other files and work with them remotely.

The other apps in the app store only support SAMBA so AFP and SFTP is a pretty big deal for me. It also supports SSH keys. The only thing it doesn't support is NFS and Rsync. However, for most people, Files Connect covers most of the bases.

It comes in handy when you want to make a new share mount. Instead of using the Web app ajax's terminal to make a folder, I log in as root and can easily make my share folders like you see below.

A few things that are cool:

You can zip and compress files. So if you want to send an email with a zip attachment, this works great. Collect a bunch of files into a folder. Compress, Send to Email.

You can add movie/video files to your camera roll. I was able to add random h.264 videos from my video share and import them into the camera roll which then allowed me to edit videos directly in iMovie. In fact, the other day, I was able to edit old VHS digitized videos on my iPhone 5 from my FreeNAS in this blog post.

If you have video files on your NAS, you can stream whatever iOS supports. This includes streaming H.264 MP4 files and I've had some luck with some AVI files. If they don't stream, you can copy to the local iPad and open in another app. I will go into streaming some more later in this post. I was able to stream 1080p 6GB files with no problem whatsoever.


Terminal Access.

There are a lot of SSH clients but the only one I use is iSSH. In my opinion, it is the best app out there for any mobile device. It also supports VNC and X11.
For an SSH client, it trumps everything else out there because it knows most mobile keyboards are limited and uses the touch screen multi gestures to make up for it.

(iPad above & iPhone screenshot below)

You can set transparency on the keyboard and there is a touch gesture that pulls up special keyboard control keys. On the iPhone, it is absolutely fantastic. Despite the fact other phones have 4-5" larger screens, the original 3.5" iPhone's SSH experience was by far more pleasant because you had more visible area while typing. I use the tab and arrow up/down quite a bit and the fact it is easily accessible makes it highly intuitive compared to an on Android like Connectbot.


Other apps.

An alternative to Files Connect is File Browser. I used this app quite a bit before Files Connect came out. It is strictly a SAMBA/CIF file explorer. It works for the most part and the GUI is more Windows like whereas Files Connect is more mac-like. In previous versions, you could not stream .AVI files. This newer one supports more streaming video format and has a new trick up it sleeve called QuickStream which will allow 3rd party video players to intercept the stream. Some video players already support this. This app also supports Airplay.

The last app I will cover in this post is O Player HD.

Out of all the apps I've mentioned, this is the only one that requires a separate purchase/download for iPad and iPhone. The others, you buy once and can use on both phone and tablet.


O Player is a 3rd party video player that supports  XVID/DIVX AVI, WMV, RMVB, ASF, H264, MKV, TS, M2TS. It is a so-so video player. It works but there are many others I would recommend over this one.
The only reason I got it was because of the SAMBA streaming functionality for non iOS default video codecs. If all of your video is H.264, you won't need this app.
This app also supports TV-out and Airplay. So in essence, you can stream from your NAS and stream back to your TV via airplay.

The only thing missing from this post is some sort of synchronization app. I haven't found one I liked and I pretty much use PogoPlug to automatically synch/backup my camera photos from my iOS and Android phones.

There you have it. Some good apps on connecting to your FreeNAS (or any *NIX computer) using your iOS device. When your Android friends brag about their external SD card, you can show them your 10TB FreeNAS box full of streamable videos and music on your iOS device.

Links:


iSSH
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/issh-ssh-vnc-console/id287765826?mt=8

Files Connect
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/files-connect/id404324302?mt=8

File Browser
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/filebrowser-access-files-on/id364738545?mt=8

O Player
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oplayer-hd-best-video-music/id373236724?mt=8

and last but not least, FreeNAS
http://www.freenas.org/

FreeNAS Mini-ITX AMD E-350 Lian Li PC-Q25 build

I recently built a FreeNAS  ZFS RAIDZ box for my personal backup archives. I wanted something elegant and low powered with the ability to run ZFS. FreeNAS is a NAS appliance built on FreeBSD. It supports the ability to run the ZFS filesystem and can be booted off a small flash storage like USB or Compact Flash.

I selected the following components:

• 6 X Hitachi 2TB 7200rpm Desktars 3.5 " drives
• ASUS E35M1-I Mini-ITX Motherboard with an AMD dual core E-350 and 8GB of RAM.
• LIAN LI Silver Aluminum PC-Q25A Mini case 
• FreeNAS-8.2.0-RELEASE-p1-x64 (r11950)
• 8GB internal Patriot USB stick as OS boot

A few notes on my setup:
The ASUS E35M1 is a low voltage netbook AMD Fusion CPU (same one found in the Thinkpad X120E) and supports six SATA 3 6Gb/s ports. The LIAN LI PC-Q25 case can hold up to seven 3.5" hard drives. Five of those seven drives can be hot-swappable.

Here are some pictures of my build.The fit-n-finish on the LIAN LI is pretty impressive. The machined aluminium is well made. This case was clearly designed to be a HTPC or NAS box. It fits well in my Apple - Macintosh environment. Except for the logo up front, it is one slick looking piece of gear.

The Asus motherboard has everything I needed. 6 SATA ports for 6 HDD drives! All the data drives are connected to the motherboard while an internal USB stick boots the FreeNAS OS.

It also has a passive cooling heatsink.

This is where the AMD solution shines. I could not find an Intel based Mini-ITX mobo/cpu with 6 SATA III 6Gb/s ports nor one with a passive heatsink. Moreover, none of the Atom boards officially support 8GB of RAM necessary to run ZFS.  This is the perfect small form factor board for FreeNAS!

Internal USB header attaches to the motherboard and hides the USB inside the case.

Picture below depicts drives loaded up. There are five hot-swappable bays. I had to put this to real world practice by taking out drives while the OS was running and without rebooting! The backplane is pretty interesting since it uses molex connectors for power.

With 8GB of ram, I have enough to run ZFS and RAIDZ; giving me roughly 9TB useable space.

After my build, I started to notice some degraded RAIDZ errors on my 3rd disk. Disk #3 seemed fine. I zeroed out the data and booted a different OS (Linux Mint) and copied files with no integrity issues. I tried the drive in different computers and everything checked out fine (S.M.A.R.T) and other scans. However ZFS zpool was giving me checksum errors. Well, it turned out to be a case of "silent data corruption." Linux Mint and Ubuntu did not see any problems but FreeNAS was able to give me a good heads up. It turned out to be a bad SATA cable. Once replaced, everything was fine.

In terms of performance:

Running a short DD benchmark,I was getting 263-268 Megabytes per second on the internal bus. This is pretty decent considering it is a RAIDZ disk array.

 [root@RAIDZ] /# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/RAIDZ/test.dd bs=2048k count=10000  
 10000+0 records in  
 10000+0 records out  
 20971520000 bytes transferred in 74.518446 secs (281427232 bytes/sec)  
 [root@RAIDZ] /#   

 [root@RAIDZ] /mnt/RAIDZ# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/RAIDZ/test.dd bs=2048k count=10000  
 10000+0 records in  
 10000+0 records out  
 20971520000 bytes transferred in 76.008326 secs (275910826 bytes/sec)  
 [root@RAIDZ] /mnt/RAIDZ#   
 

In short,

268.3899230957 megabytes

263.1290683746 megabytes


Through the network, I was getting 60-80 MB/s. This may be due to the Realtek 8111E gigabit controller on-board or the fact I was testing during the middle of the day with 60 other people on the network. I was hoping to get closer to Gigabit's theoretical limit of 125 MB/s so I may experiment with a dual NIC Intel card in the future..

Overall, I am very happy with this NAS build. It supports AFP, CIFs, NFS, iSCSI, Rsync and works surprisingly well. I also like the fact I have other FreeNAS boxes that easily sync to this one with just a few click of a mouse. 

The only thing I wish for is a motherboard with 7-8 SATA ports so I can use a SSD as a cache accelerator drive.

The NAS even works surprisingly well serving files to my iPad using AFP, Samba or SFTP.