Having moved to unlimited internet plan in the last couple of months, I’ve found myself fast running out of storage space and felt the need to upgrade. NAS devices have always been associated with business related use but the falling prices of high capacity hard disks have resulted in a growing number of home users adopting this technology in their home networking environment. Currently I have 7 Terabytes of storage spanning four internal hard drives as well as a seperate 320GB drive being occupied by the OS so I’m pretty much at full capacity there, my other option was to purchase a 2, 4 or even an 8 port SATA card but space and power consumption may become an issue.
I briefly looked at the eTRAYz from Xtreamer a couple of months ago when I was searching for a low cost 1080p media player for the oldies but I didn’t think I had a need for it. A few days ago however, a forum member on Overclockers Australia was looking to offload his eTRAYz at a reasonable price so I jumped at it. I have yet to install it as the 2 x Samsung HD203WI (2TB) that I purchased had not arrived. I am looking to utilize the RAID0 feature and see how she performs over my gigabit network.
UPDATE
I got home last night very excited about installing this NAS and while it isn’t for the fainthearted, I managed to get it set up after about an hour. I created a folder in on the NAS and expected big things since I used linear (RAID0) configuration which in theory is faster than RAID1 (Mirrored). I proceeded to transfer a folder containing six Bluray rips totalling approximately 50GB in size. Using Teracopy, I was horrified to watch as the transfer rate did not budge above 15 MB/s. My LAN is set up for Gigabit and I know it’s capable of faster than that because I have seen it.
I immediately jumped on the Xtreamer forums and found that I’m not the only one complaining of this very poor transfer speeds, I would have been livid if I actually paid the asking RRP. Users have commented and placed the blame on hardware limitations, but what I couldn’t understand is how Xtreamer can advertise something that this device is incapable of doing. Can this be fixed with a firmware issue? Who knows, one thing is certain, they didn’t fix it in the last three months that it took them to update from 1.04 to 1.05.