Importance of CPU and RAM in a NAS enclosure

[macpascal]

Hi there,

I'm looking to buy a NAS enclosure to store all our files and I can't make up my mind between the D-Link DNS-320 and the 325.

The only relevant difference between the 2 is one has a 800 Mhz CPU and 128 Mb RAM. The DNS-325 has 1.2 Ghz and 256 Mb RAM. The other differences between the 2 are not important for me at this point.

What will I loose if I go with the 320? Is the speed of transfer affected?

I don't mind waiting a little to copy files from the NAS to my laptop (I read transfer speeds of around 20 Mb/sec which is way enough for me), but I want to watch HD videos stored on the NAS, on my laptop and I don't want the reading to be paused or interrupted because of poor transfer rate. Is the CPU/RAM difference very important for this particular usage?

Thank you very much for your inputs!

Pascal

[enaberif]

ram is more important than cpu for a nas

[KaptCrunch]

cache memory in cpu is more important and RAM helps on how many users are leaching

[pitz]

I have an i7-2600 that basically runs a NAS/SAN, and a few machines actually boot off of it disklessly.

It is very nice to have lots of RAM. I can run a benchmark like CrystalDiskMark, with the 5gb file size, and in some cases, it does it entirely from the RAM, saturating the Gig-E network.

RAM is cheap. Buy lots of it.

CPU utilization when pushing 125mb/sec over Gig-E is <20% of one of the 8 "cores" of an i7-2600. If you figure 10-gig-E is 10X faster, I could probably fill a 10-gig-E connection with only 1/4 of the power of an i7-2600.

I'm a huge fan of SAN/NAS in the home. Instead of having a bunch of computers with hard drives sitting around, not in RAID, unprotected, you can consolidate it all in a single machine, protect everything with RAID-1, and get awesome performance. Buying a new computer can mean literally buying just a mobo + CPU + RAM -- and nothing else! I even boot Windows 7 (and Windows 8) off of my SAN, and also can boot Ubuntu. It works faster than a local disk!

Personally I don't like the pre-packaged 'consumer' NAS/SAN devices, but I know that not everyone has the skills to build their own.

[Arinoth]

Only advantage of going with a pre-built NAS is sometimes they can be less expensive (though limited to a few amount of drives). Way back when I had a pre-built NAS I had the DNS-323. It was an alright little thing though now that I am running my own custom built NAS (or well server) I prefer it a lot more seeing as I can fit about 10+ HDDs in my server compared to up to 2 that either of those NASs you linked. Hell even for a NAS you don't need an overly powerful system, mine's overkill using a 2100 with it streaming to the rest of my computers, back up storage, running SickBeard, CouchPotato, and some other applications. Also, what's really nice is running TeamViewer on it, as it is completely straight forward remote desktop connection software that is free to use for home users.