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

For context, 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 because we thought we could get by with low budget NAS as we don't have a lot of employees. After all, most of our files are Office documents - Word, Quickbooks etc with the occasional AutoCAD file. Oh how naive we were. 3 weeks after installation we started to feel the weight of our indiscretion. The external hard drive backups would completely freeze the server if not completed by the time we arrived the next day. Server backups (that's only 300 GB!) take 6-7 hours. Our backup list in the web interface disappeared from time to time for no reason. Google Drive backups never ran consistently no matter what polling interval we set. Slow backups had a 10% chance of files disappearing overnight. The access control setting made matters worse - the process seemed simple, but accounts never logged in consistently, so we ended up renouncing our server's password and account and kept them free. This NAS, FYI, uses a Marvell Armada 830 (1.3GHz, Dual Core) CPU and comes with 512MB of non-expandable, non-removable DDR3 RAM. Turns out a NAS device with PC-like specs from the early 2000s is ridiculously underpowered and underpowered for an office, let alone SO, HO. The NAS always reaches 100% CPU usage around 5 minutes after booting. 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. We took some screenshots of the 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. Backups with Asustor complete in 50 minutes or less, the CPU purrs at a chilly 5% load under normal load, and the RAM is almost never touched (at most, what we've seen under load is 25% utilization). 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)