About to get rid of my EX2

Hi All,

I’m about done with my 2 month old EX2 and would like not to have to deal with NAS on daily basis like i have had to with EX2.

I have been thinking of getting one of these three.

  1.  Synology DS214+

  2.  Asustor AS-602T

  3.  QNAP TS-269L

They are all around same price ($350 diskless).

Please recommend one if you had personal experience with any of these units.

Thanks

db

I don’t have any of them but wanted to share some thoughts.

Synology 214+ has Marvell Armada chip…you’re gonna get a similar experience to EX2 with that, though it has double the RAM, so you might get a very slight improvement. The CPUs in the other two are better, both Intel Atom, but Asustor has a slightly speedier CPU. I personally prefer QNAP but Asustor has been building a good reputation up despite coming in much later to the NAS market. However, grass always looks greener from the other side, when you imagine that the issues you’ve had with EX2 won’t exist with these other brands. To really get a feel for what actual users of these think, you are asking in the wrong place…WD forum users won’t likely have the first hand insight you’re looking for. For that, you need to go into the forum sites of these companies and spend some time reading to users’ issues…you’ll come away feeling, just like I did, that similar issues exist for all the top brands. Their hardware are a bit better, their firmware more mature and app ecosystem is larger…but a lot of similar problems, like bugs also exist for them. And the one thing I will miss the most with my next NAS purchase…a QNAP one, is my ability to tweak, hack and compile my own firmware…that WD allows with their source code but QNAP doesn’t with their incomplete source code.

I have a Qnap-269 (dual WD Red 2TB drives in a RAID 1), I had a Qnap-259 before my Qnap-269.  The Qnap software is quite mature and robust, plus the performance of the Qnap-269 is certainly better than the EX2 (obviously … it has a faster CPU and more RAM).  HOWEVER, I also have an EX2 (dual WD Red 2TB drives in a RAID 1) so I am in a good position to compare and contrast.  So far I am satisfied with my EX2 because of its fantastic value.  My EX2-2TB cost about $350 on Amazon, my Qnap-269-2TB cost about $575.

I love WD’s UI for the EX2 but I acknowledge WD has more work to improve overall performance (e.g., improved software efficiencies), they still have to improve their feature set (e.g., improvements to things like their USB backup and other suggestions that have been made), and they need to resolve more core level bugs (e.g., their Amazon S3 implementation is still buggy).

In summary, as a basic NAS, I think the EX2 is an excellent value.

Edit: Sorry I meant to type Raid 1, not Raid 0 … so I just edited my post.

Thank you guys