[Simon Patrick]

Dear Bob

Points noted, thank you
I hadn’t seen the 873 – and rightly or wrongly I feel happier with that chipset over the amazon one. The 832x/831x does have two 10Gbe ports though…

Not sure that I need the graphics card and hdmi ports – which seems to be the only difference from between the TS873 and the TVS873e

Have asked Qnap for some benchmarks for the 873 and the 832x – if they supply them will post them here or email them to you.

Regards

Simon

[Simon Patrick]

Dear Bob,

Thank you for your comments and insight.

I only found this forum while researching an aspect of the plan.

I was originally planning to use the 831x as it seems to do all I needed, but the local store in HK said it had been upgraded to the 832x and the DDR4 ram seemed a good choice for wider data throughput. It wasn’t a budget decision, as much as it had the features I was looking for and a low power usage and low temperature compared to other boxes which seemed to add unnecessary bells and whistles likes speakers, usb, thunderbolt etc.

As for the amazon processors, I was sceptical but there were few reviews for the 832x and it seemed a solid next step from the 831x which has lots of good reviews. But have learnt not to automatically assume ‘intel inside’ means that it’s good.

Which 8 disc box would you recommend instead?

The 859pro is from 2010, but doesn’t support 4.3.4 (only up 4.2.6) which seems to be needed for a lot of the new features like qsync (looks like a great app, does it deliver in the real world?), and it doesn’t appear to support bigger drives than 4tb. The other problem is you can’t expand the raid pool – hence the need to buy a new box (to backup the data), before replacing the current 2tb drives and relegate the 859 to offsite backup/duplication.

The 853 does appear to support 4.3.4 and 8tb drives so can offer duplication and backup.

I’m fine with buying a router to accomplish my needs and will look at your suggestion and look to understand more how it works – ethernet has been fine speed wise, but having 10GBe compatibility/functionality seems to be a good future proofing idea.

You mention a budget of only $900 but forget the 16x 8tb drives (8 for the new box and 8 for the 853) which adds another $4,000 to the bill. I am budget flexible, but everything spent has to be earned and sadly digital doesn’t pay anywhere near as well as print used to.

I do look to invest in the business. We still use the G5 because of some custom bi-lingual software that makes part of the job very easy – and because it just works. While our 2008 Macpro workhorses with ssd’s are still very fast and productive.

When we hopefully get bigger we will undoubtedly look for external help, but part of the reason for trying to work it out ourselves this time is it makes us look at the processes and understand what we need to do with the hardware but also what we have to do as staff, freelancers etc to achieve what we need and the processes and workflows we need to change/adjust.
Thank you again for your input