BitTorrent Downloads without a PC – QNAP vs Synology NAS

How many times have you left your PC on for few days to complete your bit-torrent downloads? I’ve been in the same situation several times and started searching for solutions that will help me to download stuff without a PC. The best functionality for such a need is offered by a Network Attached Storage (NAS) system with download capabilities. This solution, in addition that can be used as a silent-low-energy download station, it can offer you also shared file space for your home network, backup capabilities, multimedia support, ability to host websites (PHP and MySQL) and much more.

There are a few vendors out there that manufacture All-in-One NAS devices, but the best ones I found from my research is Synology and QNAP. To be honest I had a very hard time to decide which one is the best but finally I chose a QNAP NAS product (QNAP TS-209 II) mainly because of its hardware specifications (CPU and memory).

The QNAP TS-209 II is comparable with the Synology DS207+ unit (both support two hard-drives in RAID configuration) and they both have an extensive list of excellent features (File Server, access of all your stored files from the Internet, video and audio media streaming, BitTorrent/HTTP/FTP download engine, MySQL and PHP support to host websites, Linux OS etc). However, what made me choose the QNAP TS-209 II over the DS207+ NAS product was the amount and type of its memory. The QNAP carries 256MB DDR2 memory while the Synology carries half of it (128MB). This type of memory together with its 500MHz Marvell processor makes the QNAP TS-209 II unit a powerful Linux all-in-one NAS station that has all the required hardware capabilities for customization and expansion.

I bought my QNAP NAS from the trusted Amazon which had the best overall price (including shipping) from other sources.