My New NAS: The Thrilling Conclusion

Finally... we're done.  Here are the fruits of my search for a new home NAS solution.

The Results

I awarded 4 points for each Gold medal, 3 for each Silver and 1 point for each Bronze medal.  

I further weighted my "Most Important" criteria by a factor of 3, my "Important" critera by a factor of 2, and my "Nice-to-Haves" with a factor of 1.

Requirement	Drobo	ReadyNAS	WHS
Basic File Sharing	Gold	Gold	Gold
Advanced Media Sharing	Bronze	Gold	Silver
Storage Technology & Expandability	Gold	Gold	Bronze
Direct Backup to the Cloud	n/a	Silver	Gold
UPS Protection	n/a	Gold	Gold
Remote Access	Bronze	Gold	Gold
Automated PC Image Backup	n/a	n/a	Gold
Applications	Bronze	Silver	Gold
Flickr Synchronization	n/a	n/a	Bronze
Un-weighted points	11	24	28
Weighted points	30	58	54

Un-weighted points results favor WHS slightly -- because it's at least got a story for each of my criteria.  But when weighting gets introduced, ReadyNAS pulls ahead by a hair!

Conclusions

The Drobo is a highly elegant storage solution.  If my requirements were for a USB-based drive sitting on my desk directly connected to my workstation, I would likely buy a Drobo.  Unfortunately, the Drobo falls behind in network and more advanced features. 

I have long been attracted to the WHS platform.  And in this informal survey I was leaning heavily towards WHS.  But I want to run WHS 2011 -- and that presents two significant problems: To date, only one major manufacturer has announced a WHS 2011 box.  Unfortunately, there is no firm release date in sight for the RevoCenter -- and I don't want to wait.  That leaves me with the option of upgrading an existing, end-of-life WHS box (such as the HP MediaSmart Server EX495).  But this is not a simple task, as documented on many blogs and I'm not in the mood for a weekend project of this scale.

The second problem with WHS 2011 is the loss of the Drive Extender feature in 2011.  No one seems to understand why Microsoft did this... but it is a game-changer -- because it means if you want disk redundancy, you're managing RAID on your own.  Having managed a few RAIDs personally & professionally, I can confidently say "No Thanks!"

One of my good friends, Dave Sobel, recommended a home-made WHS 2011 box managing content on a Drobo.  This solves the Drive Extender issue, but I'd still have to build the WHS 2011 box from scratch.  This may be a compelling solution from a technology perspective, but it's also quite a bit more expensive.  And I'd prefer to keep my storage solution to a single box.  But Dave gets an "A" for creativity.

And the winner is... ReadyNAS!

The ReadyNAS is clearly the best match between features and performance.  ReadyNAS satisfies all of my major requirements (and has at least something for my minor requirements).  


So tomorrow, I will place an order for a diskless Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 4 and 4 Western Digital Caviar Black hard drives.


I'll let you know how it goes!