We have been playing around with the QNAP TS-659 Pro II unit over the last month or so. Based on the Intel Atom D525 platform, it has 6 bays and dual GbE ports, making it a candidate for the high end SMB market.

via AnandTech

Thecus is the first dual-bay NAS box manufacturer we’ve seen to ditch the usual ARM or Marvell processors found in mainstream models in favour of a fully fledged 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 CPU.

via bit-tech.net

Synology has a sensible model number nomenclature in which the last two digits refer to the year through which the model is intended for sale. The first set of digits refer to the maximum number of bays supported. Some models have a + at the end, signifying higher performance. Today, we have the DS211+ for review. The DS refers to the product category, Disk Station. 2 indicates a 2 bay model, and the 11 indicates a 2011 model. It is supposed to have a higher performance compared to the DS211 which was released in November 2010.

Today, Western Digital takes it one step further and announces availability of the internal drive as well. The Caviar Green line is now home to a 2.5TB and a 3.0TB model, priced at $189 and $239 respectively.

In this article are some new details on KQ Infotech’s ZFS kernel module and our results from testing out the ZFS file-system on Linux.

Today I have LSI’s latest RAID card, the MegaRAID 9260-8i SAS 6Gbps controller. Featuring a compact PowerPC RAID-on-Chip controller, 512mb of DDR2 cache, a PCIe 2.0 x8 slot, and SAS/SATA 6Gbps connectivity, the 9260-8i is one well equipped RAID card. Marketing documentation boasts of maximum 2875MB/s reads and 1850MB/s writes through the 800MHz PowerPC LSISAS2108 ROC, well over three times the throughput limits of the ICH10R controller built into Intel’s desktop platforms.