Question for all the Kita 's: Looking at the reviews in Amazon for the different NAS 's from Sy...

[G+_Stacey Cunningham]

Question for all the Kita's: Looking at the reviews in Amazon for the different NAS's from Synology, Drobo and Qnap; they all seem to have lots of 5 star ratings but they also have a lot of 1 star ratings as well. Does anybody know if there is a common theme to all these 1 star ratings besides users inexperience with NAS's? I'm looking to integrate a NAS into our small business Network but I don't want to battle with setup and maintenance issues if possible. Thank you in advance.

P.s. Good luck Padre in Rome!

[G+_Jason Brown]

1 star reviews are almost always user error, or unrealistic expectations. You would be happy with any of those. Each of them will have their own pitfalls and config issues. Everything always does.

[G+_Joe Valasko]

You need to worry about Customer Service or the lack thereof. Drobo Customer Service is appalling slow and inadequate. I speak from experience. I have four Drobo 5N in active service and four other Drobo's that have been retired and scrapped. I think you will find Synology support is excellent based on Padre's comments.

[G+_Jason Brown]

I'd go with Synology, QNap, Drobo, in that order

[G+_kurterst]

All three brands provide good products. And depending on your use case will probably provide you with a good experience. I love my Synology NAS. I briefly looked at a few of the 1 star reviews of a QNAP NAS. And I think anyone should read some of these 1 star reviews of any product.

 

However read these reviews critically. Some of them were because the user received bad hardware. Every manufacturer will have a small percentage of hardware that is defective. As long as they replace the hardware I don't count these reviews. I am suspect of users that receive multiple bad products. I suspect they may have electrical issues or other issues. A few of the bad reviews were because the user was upset they couldn't use their NAS drive as a USB drive. Others were because the user were trying to use it for unintended purposes and complained about that.

 

I personally think it is much better to look at the overall rating for a product. There will be 5 star reviews that are paid for or done by fan boys. And there will be ridiculous 1 star reviews as well. But if the average of all reviews is good the product is probably a decent product.

[G+_Rud Dog]

Stacey CunninghamI was one of the early purchasers of the Drobo and its later introduced Drobo Share unit. I love the fact you can take any drive larger than the one you replace and be done with it. The downside is they are quick to discontinue service or attached end of life coverage to their products. And once that happens good luck getting any help. They will be glad to sell you a new unit if you want help in that area.

The software for the Drobo I used to have installed has gone dark.

I can not get the software to reload into my Drobo to use the features it had when I first purchased it, due to discontinued support.

[G+_John D. Hawkins]

Jason Howell suggested an extension for review pages called FakeSpot that seems to work really well. I wish I had it when I bought my router.

[G+_Daniel Stagner]

The Synology platform is based on the open sourse xpenology code. It has a ton of open source support and will likely be supported for many years to come. It gets my recommendation. Also if you have some old hardware lining around you may also want to look at FreeNAS. I have been using two FreeNAS boxes for years to provide my own cloud storage for my 30+ TBs of photos with only a few minor pain points.

[G+_Stephen Butler]

User error, or rather bad user homework. The nas they got may not of had the feature the was after.

 

Though the 1 stars, the ones that don't say. "shite doesn't work..... '', should tell you more about what's missing, and be more usefull than the 5 stars, that usually say, ''great product, fits the bill and some....'". I find them useless.

[G+_DigitalMatrixIO (Eric L]

Daniel Stagner other way around. Xpen is based off Synology DSM.

[G+_Brent Vrieze]

At work we bought 2 8 bay Synologys a couple of years back. One died at 14 months (just over warranty) we threw it away. The second one was removed from service before it died but after bringing it on line it died 2 weeks later. We called Synology and they said there was an SMD solder problem with the CPU and had extended support for that model and swapped it at no charge.

 

So everyone gets a bad model periodically but if the vendor stands behind it that helps.

 

If I weren't a do it your self person I would absolutely buy a Synology because of the ease of use and the support we received. As it stands right now I don't need allot of storage so I don't have a solution, but I do need it in the future I have played with FreeNAS and loved it.

 

Below is based on a 2 year old model.

 

Synology Pros

Low power consumption( less than a beige box loaded with disks)

Hot swapable disks

plug and play, lots of built in software/tools

Port aggregation for faster then1Gb speed R/W

Hybrid RAID so you can use different size disk (same as Drobo Beyond Raid)

 

Synology Cons

Crappy drive caddie (if you don't lock them they pop open and I always loose the key)

[G+_Stephen Butler]

Brent Vrieze the best way to tell a good comply from a bad one is when you have an issue. That's why I'm happy to give Amazon there sub each year. It's worth it just for their CS. Nothing is ever an issue.

[G+_Ben Reese]

I agree with everything here. My Xpenology NAS is almost a year old and I've loved working with Synology DSM. The term "Network Attached Storage" doesn't really do it justice since these are really more of home or small office servers now.

 

If you have a domain or may in the future, you'll probably want a NAS that will integrate with that. I've never used Drobo, but it looks like Active Directory integration starts in their enterprise models. I think Synology and Qnap include it in all lines.