On Wed, 30 May 2012, Trent W. Buck wrote:
I've been
meaning to write a blog post on it, if nothing else other than
to say "don't buy thecus unless you're prepared to put a lot of work
in".
Ha, I just tell people "do not buy" and leave it at that :-)
It's the best specced *hardware* in that price bracket though. 1G (or was
it 2G?) of ram in the 4200! (and I replaced it with 4G; vs a maximum of
256M in the qnap). Strangely, their crappy hacked up 2.6.32 kernel is 32
bit, but the atom D525 instruction set is 64bit (and that's what debian I
have installed).
For home I *have* been meaning to look at sourcing a
SFF box that can
run Debian, take 2 or 3 3.5" SATA drives in an mdadm RAID1 or 5, and
then shove that out to the LAN as NFS/SFTP/HTTP...
On ozbargains, the HP microserver has been popping up a few times for
circa $200 to $250.
With the 4G in my thecus, I can (and do) afford to run zfsonlinux :)
The n4200pro came with a battery backup too so you could presumably get
away with turning off write barriers. But LiIon, so will only last
a few years. Meanwhile, I was thinking of buying a non volatile memory
pci card to stick in the spare slot for zil/l2arc, but they're kinda
pricey and small. I don't like SSD on principle, because I want it to
last more than 4 years before I run out of write.
--
Tim Connors