Review on Zyxel NAS326: Personal Cloud Storage [2-Bay] with Remote Access & Media Streaming – Disks Not Included by Dawn Fischer

For comparison, we have a small office. In the best case, we have 5 employees working at the same time. Most days we had 2 to 3 days. We bought this unit thinking we could get away with a low budget NAS as we don't have a lot of employees. After all, most of our files are Office documents - Word, Quickbooks, etc. and sometimes AutoCAD files. Oh how naive we were. 3 weeks after installation we began to feel the weight of our indiscretion. only 300 GB!) takes 6-7 hours. Our backup list in the web interface sometimes disappeared for no reason. Google Drive backups never ran consistently no matter what polling interval we set. Slow backups overnight had a 10% chance of files disappearing. Setting up access control became increasingly difficult - the process seemed simple, but the accounts never logged in sequentially, so we ended up without a password and account on our server. FYI, this NAS uses a Marvell Armada 830 processor (1.3GHz, dual core). and features 512 MB of non-expandable, non-removable DDR3 RAM. Turns out a NAS unit with specs like an early 2000s PC is ridiculously underpowered and underpowered for an office, let alone SO, HO. The NAS always hits 100% CPU usage. about 5 minutes after the download. I'd even be afraid to use this at home - it's like a device you set up once and if you ever touch it again forget to overload it for fear. I took some screenshots from NASTester that we use to test the read/write speeds. The first (drive letter P) is from the Zyxel NAS326. The second (drive letter R) is from our new Asustor AS5202T replacement (with an Intel Celeron processor and RAM slots we upgraded to 8GB). The difference in performance is unprecedented - Asustor backups are ready in 50 minutes or less, the CPU purrs at a steep 5% load under normal load, and the RAM is almost never touched (the maximum we saw during load was an occupancy rate of 25%). Plus, Asustor is packed with customization, security, and backup options - we love that. All this to say that we learned from our mistake the hard way but were more disappointed than we should have been. PROS: -- Fast installation -- Small device -- Kensington slot -- FTP support CONS: -- "Unnamed" CPU with scary clock speed. -- 512 MB RAM that cannot be upgraded is a joke. -- Hair-breaking access controls -- Nearly useless Google Drive sync and other cloud integrations -- Obscenely long backups -- Web interface randomly crashes -- Device is noticeably loud and noisy under normal load - - Online troubleshooting is useless (forums and official Zyxel sites basically repeating/shocking what the manual already says, with no real help). *could* be your NAS. Anything else and you should seriously look elsewhere (we highly recommend the AS5202T despite its price)