Home NAS - Recommendations

stoofa · 12 Sep 2008 at 12:25

There seems to be many NAS boxes for the home user available - far too many in fact.
I'm looking for a NAS box with the following options/features:

GB networking if at all possible
Comes empty and I can add 1 or 2 SATA HD's
Quiet - So few/none active cooling fans
Smallish - It's going to sit on the end of a desk
RAID - Considering using RAID 1 for redundency

I've got a couple of Samsung 500GB SATA drives.
I'd ideally like to put them into such a unit as possibly a RAID 1 array.
I'd then like to be able to access this 500GB of storage from the desktops and laptops on my home network.

Any recommendations?

Major_Disaster · 12 Sep 2008 at 15:53

Any ideas on budget? The standard home user NAS boxes that have HDD(s) come with them tend to have very poor read / write performance.

Bearing that in mind, something like this looks promising (if not slightly expensive): http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-029-BT

And then stick in a pair of 500GB Samsungs and your away.

Imy · 12 Sep 2008 at 16:52

You might as well knock GB NIC of your requirements list as no SOHO NAS is going to use more than 100Mbit.

wesley · 12 Sep 2008 at 18:51

problem with any "ready" NAS box is they are slow even with gigabyte network

if performace is a must for you then build a wee SFF with XP and share folders

premist · 12 Sep 2008 at 19:26

If you have an old box lying around then I would recommend FreeNas

Major_Disaster · 12 Sep 2008 at 19:30

premist said:
If you have an old box lying around then I would recommend FreeNas

Good idea. Sticking a couple of hard drives in an old pc you may have lying around with Gig ethernet would give you much better performance and probably be cheaper.

Imy · 14 Sep 2008 at 01:42

For the price some of these so called high-end NAS's go for, you could build a whole new high-spec PC for cheaper and it'd be much faster.

Do what the guys above suggest. You could always get a quieter case, psu, etc if that's a concern for 24/7 operation.

Pandobear · 14 Sep 2008 at 12:16

Have a look at Windows Home Server, this product is designed to replace/Enhance the NAS market place, and will be much faster if installed on a low end , i.e. sub £150 new server box. You have the option to add as many drives as you like, and ti will auto backup all other machine on your network. Take a look

Phil2008 · 13 Oct 2008 at 02:02

Im also thinking of doing the same thing with my 2nd pc, putting a few 1tb drives in it and using it as my main backup system.