Cheap 'n' Cheerful NAS

Seb

Seb

Seb

Associate
Joined
24 Apr 2006
Posts
209
Location
Worcester, UK
Are these any good? Ive only ever heard bad things and had bad experiences with netgear, but its always been with routers and modems and switches. Anyone know what this NAS is like? I dont want to but something with drives as I have two IDE disks I want to put in it.

Netgear SC101 Storage Central (NW-081-NG)

- IDE Hard drive interface
- Connects to any 10/100 network through any brand of router
- Monitor drive and network activity using the status LEDs
- Dimensions: 17cm x 11cm x 15cm


Full Specification

Price: £61.95 (£72.79 Including VAT at 17.5%)
Click to expand...
 
I'm not that worried about speed as its just storage for MP3s and docs. Having read a few reviews ive been put off it a bit though; no support for Linux/MacOSX :(

I want something thats a simple drive mapping; this NetGear requires a software/driver install. :eek:

Anyone know of any alternatives for similar cost?
 
A friend of mine had one and twas v slow, in the end he used an old pc (500mhz) and bought a PCI IDE Card and chucked a TB worth of discs in it with a small linux program (samba I think) and run a file server under his stairs!
 
Just bought a qnap ts-101 from a competitor. It's not cheap but it's a very nice piece of kit. For £230 I've got a stonking 250gig Seagate SATA2 accessable through gigabit NAS (and a whole load of other nice features).

I did a lot of research before I bought this and came to the conclusion that with NAS you get what you pay for. Yep, you can set up a little PC somewhere with Samba or such like on it but that's a bit too geeky for me. I was up and running with the QNAP in about 10 minutes - 8.5 of those were spent formatting the hard drive.
 
230 quid eh...

Seems a tad expensive for only 250GB. If it was just for me I would probably consider it but I need some sort of network storage to use as a file server and backup for the whole house. Us lot would get through 250GB in ten minutes lol

Within the next 3 months there should be 2 desktops and 2 laptops in the house.

Might end up being 3 desktops if I make my own NAS box...

SiriusB
 
It's not the storage that's expensive it's the actual qnap. You can put whatever size drive you want in there, for various reasons I won't go into the seagate 250gig was the only one I could lay my hands on at the time. The actual qnap is about £180.

Since I bought it last week I dare say something better has now come along but at the time it had one of the best specs I could find for the money. A google for "qnap" will bring up the manufacturers page.

Briefly it's got gigabit ethernet (which still seems pretty rare), can be extended using USB2.0 or esata (also pretty rare), it's case is aluminium and works as a big heat sink so there's no fan (lovely and quiet), it has plenty of built in functionality (like a torrent server) and it looks ace.

As I said not cheap, but you pays your money....
 
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