I have to make the decision asap, so hopefully someone can shed me some light on this.
I have a very good experience with TS Pro II. Now I need to purchase one more NAS but not sure if I should go for TS Pro II again or TS III.
It seems to me that
- TS Pro II only supports SATA I while TS III supports SATA II
- TS III has a faster CPU
So I think TS III should be faster than TS Pro II, is this right?
As to reliability, which one is more reliable?This is quite important too besides the speed, because this unit will be setup in our remote office that does not have any IT people to maintain it.
TS III has 2 Gigabit ports, can I "combine" the two ports to increase transfer speed?
We have a peer to peero network with a Gigabit network switch, 7 computers in the network
Thanks a lot
jack
Ok well hope this helps...
For the Terastation III the SATA II advantage seems nice, but doesn't actually buy you much. Most SATA II drives running in a SATA I mode show no performance deltas.
TS III does have a faster cpu which does indeed translate to improved performance. In general the performance has been very acceptable on our systems.
The redundant NIC ports are a big bonus assuming you use and configure them properly.
Also something you didn't note, the Terastation III does have a more nifty-looking GUI, but it's still not as feature-rich as could be.
Regarding reliability, that's not a fair question!! :)
TS III is still very new, and there have been a decent number of bugs we've encountered, but they've resolved several in firmware updates (still a few more to go from what I've seen), while the TS Pro II has had time to mature further.
That said, the Pro II will likely not be around much longer as the TS III series is a likely replacement model.
So I would say if you want a faster performing solution with a newer GUI and redundant NICs, and will be around longer in terms of product availability, the Terastation III is the likely choice. Just keep in mind it is new so initially you may have to work through some firmware bugs, but if you want support for new/upcoming operating systems, the TS III is more likely to receive the appropriate updates than the TS Pro II.
HOWEVER: If you prefer to use something that is working for you now, and you don't want to deal with a 'new' product (and all that entails), and don't have a concern with next-gen Operating systems (i.e. Windows 7 etc), the TS Pro II is the better choice.
Hope this helps you make the decision that's right for you. :)
Thank you Rinthos for your prompt reply :smileytongue:
"Most SATA II drives running in a SATA I mode"
- to my understanding, if m/b supports SATAII and the hard drive is jumpered to SATAII, the hard drive will run in SATAII mode. Is this wrong?
Anther thing is that i doubt if i am able to gain double speed if I "combine" two ethernet ports. I think the network switch is limiting the speed to 1Gb. If this is true, i dont see the advantage to combine 2 ethernet ports then
thanks
jack
I generally agree w/ you, but I'm just noting that SATA II drives running in SATA II mode don't necessarily perform much better than the same SATA II drive running in SATA I mode.
The drives don't typically max out, and with the network overhead, you can't generally hit the 150MBps limit. So don't necessarily assume that SATA II provides improved performance. In the case of the NVX vs. NV+, the NVX does perform better, but it's a typical CPU/processor enhancement, not so much Sata I vs Sata II.
Regarding the NIC ports, you can try to leverage the bandwith of the aggregate (2gig instead of 1, remember each port can be 1gig so you can have 2) or configure them for 'failover' (if one fails, it fails over to the other NIC), but it really depends on how your local networks are setup and if you have the associated capacity. :)
The main advantage of having two NICs is fault-tolerance. You won't get double speed from using both NICs. When we first got our TS III, I found that the write performance was about 16 MB/s. This was for writing a single 1 GB file, over a direct gigabit connection to my PC, over the SMB protocol. That corresponds to about 128 Mbit/s, which is still much less than the network connection. Read speeds will be higher, but I can't imagine that they would be enough to be limited by a single gigabit connection.
The processor on the TS III is better than the Pro II, but since the devices use software RAID, the bottleneck is still at the processor, not the LAN (unless you're using 100 Mbit Ethernet).