Best NAS option?

Phemo · 10 Dec 2010 at 22:34

Personally, I bought a Chenbro ES34069 case, a Gigabyte GA-D525TUD mini ITX motherboard (with a 1.8GHz dual core Atom on it) and 2GB of DDR3. The case is tiny and has 4 hot swappable SATA drive bays. Sure, it's larger than the 2 bay NAS boxes but it offers more flexibility (in that it's a PC and can run whatever you want and it has 4 drive bays) and better performance than most of these crappy home oriented NAS boxes (80MB/sec plus network transfers isn't bad going at all in my opinion). Total cost for the case inc PSU, mobo and RAM was around £290. There's also an internal bay for a 2.5" HD into which I've fitted a drive just to hold the OS, so the 4 hotswap bays are literally all full of just storage drives.

wolvers · 11 Dec 2010 at 10:51

That looks great Phemo, what OS are you running on it?

Phemo · 11 Dec 2010 at 11:19

I just put Windows 7 on it myself as my hard drives already had a bunch of stuff on and I didn't want to have to mess about backing it up, reformatting to another filesystem and then restoring it all. Windows 7 seems to provide the best network transfer rates out of any version of Windows so that ruled out, say, XP (though no doubt Server 2008 R2 would be the same as 7 in that respect). If I had blank drives I'd possibly consider FreeNAS, although it's nice to have the option to be able to run other stuff on it too so I'd probably end up with some Linux distro.

mark66 · 11 Dec 2010 at 12:25

Hi,

A couple of friends have the Netgear Duo (2 disk) and a Netgear ReadyNas NV+ (4 disk). They both seem happy with them and the build quality looks excellent. A Netgear Duo can be had for £240 with 2 x 2TB drives.

I wondered if any of you guys considered the Netgear options and would be interested to hear why you didn't choose them?

Can you get a Synology with 2x2TB (Raid 1) for less than £240?

Cheers

lixxus · 11 Dec 2010 at 14:29

Larkspeed said:
I use FreeNAS on one of my machines here.

Works just like any other NAS box, right down to built in torrent client, itunes server and others.

Totaly free so if you have some old gear kicking around you can seup a nas for nothing.

+1

I am using version 8 beta and its really good.