Category: Storage

Tested Technology has a couple of entry-level two-Bay NAS devices, sent to us by the Chinese manufacturer, TerraMaster. Why two? Although the two machines are almost physically identical, one—the F2-210—is ARM-based while the other—the F2-221—uses an Intel x86 processor. Functionally they’re very similar, both using TerraMaster’s Linux-based TOS operating system. One difference is power consumption, the F2-210 being rather more economical on juice (see section Power Consumption below). There’s also a big difference in the… Now read on…

I’m about to contradict myself. This is an interesting experiment for me and one I hope you’ll feel the same way about. In our earlier review of the Synology entry level DS119j I wrote confidently: The single drive isn’t technically a limitation on capacity—the DS119j’s specs allow for a drive as large as Toshiba’s magnificent helium-sealed MG07ACA14TE. Yes, that’s 14TB. But even if you can stump up the necessary £550, this is not an upgrade… Now read on…

In the first part of this review, we covered the DS119j hardware, how to install the operating system and some of the niceties of its power consumption. But at this point, you probably want to know what you can actually do with the thing. The short answer is: quite a lot. But—and this is crucial— not all at once. DSM? MY EXPERIMENTS WITH THE DS119j raised some doubt about what the three letters of the… Now read on…

We’re all having to run local area networks (LANs) these days. Back in the last century, our IT life tended to be based around our PC. Or maybe a pair of PCs, with the odd items of data initially being swapped between them via floppy disks. Techies call this Sneakernet. As the century wore to a close, we started joining our devices together. At first, using wire—Ethernet cable. But by the time laptops became ubiquitous,… Now read on…

You can never have enough storage.  My first hard drive, back in the early ’80s, was a Seagate ST-506, its massive capacity of 5MB (yes, that’s MEGAbytes) being a snip at around £3,500 in today’s money.  My current MacBook Air hosts a solid state drive (SSD) that’s physically an eighth of the size and over 50,000 times the data capacity. But, as I say, you can never have enough storage. Wheel on the Toshiba Canvio… Now read on…