A NAS solution anybody?

I've been looking for awhile and from what I can gather NO ONE is perfect atm. Either the hardware fails or the software sucks and somebody is always on the phone with tech support.

Great.

So does anyone have experience in this area? My budget is $200 or less and I only need to be able to stream music & video, RAID (which I don't know much about honestly), password protection, and access from the internet.

I'd also like to note that my old computer in my signature is still kicking around so if there is a way to utilize that I'm interested as well.

 

You could check Synology if you haven't done so already. I have one and it works great.

 

I personally like more WHS, but out of using it for dling and other stuff, but if just want a nas, probably synology o qnap are good choices n have good entry lvl, but you probably gona need around $200 diskless if you want some sort of redudancy, like Synology DS210j, WHS arent that far off in price though, like ASUS TS Mini SOHO Server.

 

if you are just using it for storage and speed isnt a huge issue I am using a Western Digital World book II 2tb (raid 0) nas... write speeds are slow but the power useage is around 5w and you can usual find it for less then 200

 

DS210j is probably the cheapest actually usable NAS - however it's probably your budget, diskless. It's still dead slow though.

 

Synology looks perfect to me. Granted I gotta drop more dough for hard drives but at least I'm the one picking them. Black Friday will be here soon enough...

 

I've been using a D-Link DNS-321 for about a month and a half, and it's awesome. It works perfectly in the home network, and there's all kinds of Linux-based addons you can use to make it a downloading station. Transmission and Plowshare for the win.

 

When selecting the drives just be careful, as most manufacturers are moving to 4k cluster on 2tb, this might be fine on new os like vista/7, but on olders os like xp/whs it does have some issues, not a big deal but most of the time need to align, not sure how this works on linux based nas though, just a warning before you buy to crosscheck this, and be sure to check whatever NAS you end up buying home page to see if they work with it, specially wd consumer drives that sometimes have some limitations with raid.

Hey forge, nice to see you into this also , btw just wondering if there are addons for linux based NAS for megaupload or just like bittorrent.

 

I have both a Bittorrent client, Tranmission, and a program for direct DLs (Rapidshare, Megaupload, etc) called Plowshare. It can apparently decode the security images automatically, and, if I set up a text file with a list of URLS, it'll DL them automatically. It's real sweet.

Just don't ask me technical questions, though. I still don't know my way around Linux command lines, haha. I've barely scratched the surface of what this little box is capable of.

 

If speed isn't an issue, why are you using raid0 ? If one disk fails, you loose everything.

Just being curious here

 

Drobo? 10char

 

Or more economically, there's Thecus.

I run a 2.3TB available 5 disc RAID-6 array made from 750 Gig SATA drives, allowing for two simultaneous drive failures with no loss of data. I once lost the MB of my 1st Thecus chassis. I bought a cheap replacement used off eBay, transfered the drives from one chassis to the other making sure to maintain the stack order, and it re-built the array perfectly with no data loss.

@ the OP, dunno how you intend to get a chassis and drives for $200. But to keep the price down look for a used N4100Pro on eBay. But I'd never buy actual harddrives off eBay.