Thecus 2 Bay 2.5" NAS thoughts

[Greg King]

Forum Folk,

Thecus announced the worlds smallest NAS device, using a pair of 2.5" notebook SATA drives. We should have one in for testing by the end of the month, once units become available for review samples.

My questions to you all are what are your thoughts on this. I have pondered the usefulness of such a device and I do like the low power aspect but I am anxious to test out the speed of the device. A lot of this is going to come down to the internals.

Thoughts?

 

[Merlin]

Sounds interesting.
Maybe a mobile NAS ?
And the drive storage of 2.5 notebook drives, I think I have seen it up to 250 gigs ( could be mistaken ), so 2 of a total of 500 gigs.
I'm sure there may be a great use for it

 

[Greg King]

Notebook storage is up to 500GB now. 1TB in RAID 0 and 500GB in RAID 1. Not too bad if you ask me. We'll see how it performs in about a month.

 

[Kougar]

I'm not sure I like the idea? If well treated a desktop drive should last about five years, often more.... what is the average lifespan of a laptop drive??

320GB laptop drive costs the same as a 1TB desktop drive, so its still not the best value. This reason alone is probably what kills the idea with me.

 

[Rob Williams]

320GB laptop drive costs the same as a 1TB desktop drive, so its still not the best value. This reason alone is probably what kills the idea with me.

Well to be fair, you can get 500GB notebook drives for the price of a 1TB desktop drive ($10 more actually). Still, you raise a good point. This NAS might be a little smaller, but what's the real point? It's not so small that it changes anything about where you'd put it, and in the end, it seems to offer more downsides than upsides (slower speeds, lower densities, higher prices). I'm not sure about the lifespan of a notebook drive, but I don't think they are any worse than desktop drives. I had used a 60GB drive in a Dell notebook over the course of 3 years (of which the notebook was turned in 66% of the time) and it never let me down.

 

[Kougar]

Yes, I also have a four year old laptop drive that's seen more use than not. But I think almost any tech head has one or three 10-40GB desktop drives that are almost a decade old and refuse to die. I have a bunch of drives from various manufacturers that are somewhere around or just past the 5 year mark and should have years of life left in them.

I didn't know 500GB laptop drives were quite that cheap now... interesting! But still, that's exactly halving the potential storage capacity. A 2-Bay RAID 1 system would be limited to 500GB.