On Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:50:49 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

snip good info

As it happens,
for daughter, the ability to access work photos that she may have been
processing at home, from work (or anywhere) might actually be useful
to her.

The whole "personal cloud" thing is something they push these days.

It's just yet another ongoing cost (if not limited or on your own kit
etc).

I was looking at this base model:
https://www.netgear.com/home/product...#tab-techspecs

Would their be any reason it wouldn't be as reliable as say a Synology
DS218j (my other consideration)?

I have a dozen or more of that class of machine installed in various
client's offices. Some have been running now 24/7 for 8 years. They all
have WD "Red" drives. In that time we have had zero failures, and I have
only needed to do a forced restart perhaps a couple of times between
them. So based on that limited sample size, I would rate the reliability
as very good.

Good to hear, thanks.

(Note that although they are superficially similar, the internal
architecture of them has evolved quite substantially over the years. The
early ones were SPARC based, then later ARM, and some Intel ATOM).

Noted.

I think they have all suffered the same "progress" to an extent. They
started with very simple GUIs which were basically hierarchical lists of
tasks, and have got more elaborate with time. My current QNAP has a full
blown windowing GUI running inside a browser window.

And that's fine, if they are well designed but it seems much of this
stuff is coming directly from China with a Chinglish manual and
'bitsy' UI. I think the Synology boxes have a bit of a reputation for
the latter, with some utility overlap confusing the issue.

One thing the above tech spec isn't clear about is the standby power
consumption and how you wake it from standby? It mentions the WOL
power consumption but would that mean you would have to send it a WOL
packet to regain access to the shares?

You can schedule power on times. Normally they will wake when something
tries to access them though.

And that would be ok, but I wasn't sure if it was the same thing as
the specific mention of WOL he

https://www.netgear.com/home/product...#tab-techspecs

"Power Consumption - Wake on LAN 1.0W"

I might have considered it to mean 'wake on access' if they hadn't
specifically used the term Wake on Lan (which I have set / used etc)?
I might just be being wary because I've experienced cheap NAS's in the
past that require 'special software' to use them fully (that then
becomes an issue when using numerous machines and Linux etc).

I've just had a quick Google and it looks like the RN10200 (empty
chassis) is around £250 (V the DS218j at £155) so that's probably
decided that. ;-)

They do seem to have gone up market price wise - the entry level 2 bay
units were around £100 to start with.

That would be much more doable John. ;-)

Would you know if the Synology box is as easy to access remotely John
(I believe I can via their 'QuickConnect' facility)?

Not tried TBH - the last 2 bay Synology I played with seemed easy enough
to use locally - but that was before cloudy was big!

;-)

Cheers, T i m