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I am considering getting a NAS for home use (file hosting & media hosting (1080p) to ~ 3 devices simultaneously). I would like to set up 4 drives with RAID 0+1 and am wondering whether to buy a 4 bay NAS like the QNAP TS-419 P+ or the cheaper solution of buying a 2 bay NAS like the QNAP TS-219 P+ and add on a 4 bay expansion via eSata such as this. As the 2 bay + expansion is cheaper and you get 2 extra bays.

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The eSATA extender's description says:

The RAID engine is embedded within the enclosure and performs all RAID parity calculation to reduce CPU utilization from the host QNAP NAS

So apparently this mode of operation that you want is fully supported. Now, I believe your network will be a bottleneck and not eSATA, so I don't think you'll get any performance degradation. This is of course assuming that the NAS box is sane and its eSATA port is as fast as its internal SATA ports, etc.

However, you're getting two boxes instead of one. Twice the amount of things to go wrong, etc. So it will be less reliable. But I think it will be just as fast for you.

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Hi, thanks for the response. Given that the RAID engine is embedded in the extension enclosure is it possible to have a RAID 0+1 setup where 2 disks are in the host QNAP NAS and the other 2 disks are in the extension enclosure? – Aly Oct 9 '11 at 16:00
@Aly: I think most probably not (the extension enclosure has the hardware to manage disks, and SATA connection is uni-directional). There is no way hardware in the extension can access disks that are connected to some other SATA bus inside the extension's host (the NAS box). – haimg Oct 9 '11 at 16:08
Thanks, answer accepted :) – Aly Oct 9 '11 at 20:08
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