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Seagate vs. WD: Battle for the SOHO NAS Crown

Seagate vs. WD: Battle for the SOHO NAS Crown
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The storage market may have endured its ups and downs in recent years, but the rise of personal and SOHO network-attached storage (NAS) has been a non-stop juggernaut. In general, products in this segment cost under $2,000, and they are typically comprised of Linux-based enclosures featuring up to six drive bays. Installed drives can be configured in any of several modes, including striped for performance (RAID 0), mirrored for protection (RAID 1), and a balanced mix of protection, capacity, and performance (RAID 5). Users can pick whichever modes best suit their needs, but the common thread among them is a need for backup.

Homes and businesses alike are gravitating toward having less storage inside their systems and greater reliance on external resources. Consider Apple's new Mac Pro tower. For all its groundbreaking design and appeal to prosumers and professionals, the cylindical system only features 1TB of onboard capacity. Apple now assumes that buyers will leverage high-speed Thunderbolt 2 and Ethernet ports for additional needs, whether those needs be direct-attached, LAN-attached, or in the cloud.

In his 2012 "Network-Attached Storage Market Study," Unistar Group's Howard Miller identified three primary trends driving the home/SOHO NAS trend: mobility, digital recording, and an excess of devices and data. Mobility implies an increasing reliance on highly portable devices with limited onboard storage capabilities. Consider cell phones that might only feature 16GB or 32GB of user storage space. Even ignoring the fact that 32GB isn't much in an era of rampant 1080p video recording, trying to navigate and manage 32GB of files through a mobile user interface can be a frustrating affair. Many users want to offload their data to a larger, centralized repository from which they can pull files wirelessly when needed. The cloud can serve this function, but going beyond the few gigabytes of a free "starter" account entails monthly subscription costs, and cloud storage services may not offer the speed of a dedicated NAS solution.

With digital recording, Miller is thinking in terms of storage pools for DVRs and set-top boxes, and this remains a valid application, although it is an eroding one for home users as they adopt streaming services, such as Netflix and Hulu, which provide subscribers with unlimited content viewing from remote storage resources. That said, the amount of user-generated multimedia continues to skyrocket.

People may post a fraction of their files on YouTube or other services, but the rest, oftentimes along with the original, pre-editing source files, still come to rest on local storage. As in-PC drive counts shrink, this content increasingly needs to find a safe haven on high-capacity storage that will keep files accessible no matter where the user might be or what device he or she is using to call up that content.

Finally, Miller's mention of "too many devices, too much data" raises the problem of users loading up their storage resources with all manner of files from a diversity of device types. A family or small office might be pouring in thousands of files across dozens of file formats, with no adherence to folder organization or much of any rhyme or reason. Increasingly, home/SOHO NAS products have been adding onboard intelligence to assist with sorting content as well as lowering the technical barriers to making that content securely available to users beyond the LAN. Not least of all, the addition of more USB ports gives NAS enclosures the ability to share even more data than what their bays can provide.

Purchasing a NAS solution, however, does not begin and end with the enclosure. Netgear, Thecus, Synology, Buffalo, and others all make very impressive NAS products, but buyers must also consider the drives that go into those bays. In a sense, it's like buying car tires. The vehicle isn't much without them, and the wrong tire choice can yield disasterous results at the worst possible time. This article will discuss some of the attributes of hard drives built specifically for NAS enclosures (and features noticeably absent from drives not meant for NAS storage) and compare the performance of two leading options as benchmarked in our lab.