Looking at getting a NAS drive as ripping my CD collection is filling up my drive fast!

Looking at 500gb (cant stretch £'s to 1TB yet), but every drive seems to get slated for speed and high failure rates. WD and buffalo live being examples.

Anyone own a NAS drive, and have any advice?

I'm in a similar situation to yourself, what I've been considering is to get a NAS storage box and then buy standard HDD's. Something similar to this Netgear SC101 Storage Central - Aria Technology .

Only problem is it seems to be a more expensive solution. :(

All kinda depends what you are after. If you have an old PC lurking about, you can build summit cheaper with that at the expense of probably slightly higher power usage etc, but you dont need a fast machine, and you could drop antivirus software on it if you wanted to as well

1TB nas drives are not that expensive. PC world currently have the 1TB WD mybook NAS drive for £149.

QNAP UK Distributor QNAPSTORE.co.uk - QNAP TS-209

My NAS of choice, or the TS101 is pretty cheap.

Any spare PC's knocking about?

You can use FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server - Home which runs from a USB Pen drive and you can expand it all the time by just adding drives.

Another option is Windows Home Server, again if you have a spare PC.

Other than that the 1TB Mybooks from PC World are a steal at the minute as Manny says.

The problem with most NAS's these days is that they are relatively slow... they may have gbit networks but can only usually manage around 5mb a second transfer because of the processor they use.

I have a few Linksys NLSU2's which are just tiny embedded linux devices with usb ports to add your own hard drives... theres quite a community for hacking them to run linux binarys.. bittorent, apache, mysql etc

i have a synology ds106e which is great and hasn't put a foot wrong.

dlink 323 is another with plenty of hacks available

I'm quite interested in going down this route too

Only challenge is I currently have a PC in my attick serving as a "server", i.e. holds all of my media, has an ftp client and a torrent client running on it. I used to fold on it too, but it's slow (underclocked) and not worth the hassle.

I'd look at replacing it with a dedicated NAS box mainly in order to reduce power consumption. Question is, can I have services such as FTP, torrent and Samba available from it at the same time? Needs gigabit ethernet too. Colin, I take note of your comment on speed. When you say 5mb, presumably you mean 5MB (5 mega bytes)? 5mb for me means 5 milli bits :P

I have a D-link DNS-323 - works well, runs RAID 1 and takes SATA drives.

I'm quite interested in going down this route too

Only challenge is I currently have a PC in my attick serving as a "server", i.e. holds all of my media, has an ftp client and a torrent client running on it. I used to fold on it too, but it's slow (underclocked) and not worth the hassle.

I'd look at replacing it with a dedicated NAS box mainly in order to reduce power consumption. Question is, can I have services such as FTP, torrent and Samba available from it at the same time? Needs gigabit ethernet too. Colin, I take note of your comment on speed. When you say 5mb, presumably you mean 5MB (5 mega bytes)? 5mb for me means 5 milli bits :P

Most of the QNAP range offer, FTP, Bittorrent, MediaServer, Itunes server, Web server, Forum PHP, Linux compatability, Gigabit ethernet, and redundancy in the form of 2 disks either raid 0 or raid 1 all built in. Check them out they are awesome.

www.qnap.co.uk

re the torrent d/l side of things it can be somwhat hit or miss if these work well or not - also some of the private torrent sites only let certain clients use their tracker, so couldn't be sure if your NAS would actually work on your usual sites

Ooooh hadn't heard of QNAP stuff. Looks nice.

But the TS-409 is just under £400 :eek: and that's without harddrives.

So it looks like once you get to this level, you'd still be better off with a PC. I'll look at building a uatx or something with minimal power requirements. Surely, you'll be well under £400 and it'll be even more flexible...

I do get the impression that these items would have little attraction given their cost next to a normal PC. I suppose they're more fire and forget though, and arguable are more stable than a Windows box. Having said that, my server running XP had an uptime of around 9 months without rebooting or showing any problems whatsoever

I'm in a similar situation to yourself, what I've been considering is to get a NAS storage box and then buy standard HDD's. Something similar to this Netgear SC101 Storage Central - Aria Technology .

the netgear box needs specific software running on each pc on the network to allow access to the drives so is not a true server

don't get the sc101 - it looks like a toaster and runs as hot as one

it also has had bad reviews re speed/building of raid arrays and requires drivers installed on pcs that need to access it

better netgear stuff is the rebranded infrant gear since they bought the company - readynas i think the name is

I'm in a similar situation to yourself, what I've been considering is to get a NAS storage box and then buy standard HDD's. Something similar to this Netgear SC101 Storage Central - Aria Technology .

Only problem is it seems to be a more expensive solution. :(

There is a problem with the netgear one.

IIRC it is that is uses a custom file system and you need a driver to get the data. As such if a box dies but the drives are ok you have no easy way to get at your data.

I work for a company that makes enterprise storage and I can honestly say that in my personal option, after much searching I will be buying a mini ITX box and using FreeNAS to do this.

There is a problem with the netgear one.

IIRC it is that is uses a custom file system and you need a driver to get the data. As such if a box dies but the drives are ok you have no easy way to get at your data.

I work for a company that makes enterprise storage and I can honestly say that in my personal option, after much searching I will be buying a mini ITX box and using FreeNAS to do this.

I think that's what I'm swaying towards, Mark. Not necessarily with FreeNAS, but some cut down Windows or Linux to provide all the features I want.

If you're interested, I posted in hexus as they're generally very friendly and helpful. Clicky

I think that's what I'm swaying towards, Mark. Not necessarily with FreeNAS, but some cut down Windows or Linux to provide all the features I want.

If you're interested, I posted in hexus as they're generally very friendly and helpful. Clicky

I have a design in my head using COTS which would come in under £300 with 2 drives.

I said freeNAS as that is simple for that, but I'd probably run openBSD/FreeBSD/Linux to provide router, firewall, wireless, web/e-mail server and NAS device, possibly with iSCSI.

You're more than welcome to the details once I've got it finalised, but £300 plus freeNAS would get you a very good NAS device.

Failing that if you some spare cash I know some people that will sell you a SAN

EDIT: Having read some of the stuff on that thread such as SATA multipliers I really do take issue with what they say on some points.

Thanks folks for mushing my brain even more!

Drop me a PM if you want my opinion on your specific needs and what to do.

Drop me a PM if you want my opinion on your specific needs and what to do.

Is it ok to drop you a PM still?

Is it ok to drop you a PM still?

I've sent you a PM with my MSN in as I won't be checking brisky much any more.

Feel free to drop me a mail at that address or add me on msn.