Mac Friendly (AFP) upgradeable NAS box?

PardonTheWait

PardonTheWait

PardonTheWait

Soldato
Joined
26 Aug 2003
Posts
24,297
Sup,

I'm reaching the point where I'd really like to get hold of some sort of network storage solution. I've got a drive on my Extreme, but I'd like something a bit more... proper. I've looked at the Netgear Stora and so on - has anyone used them? Do they play nicely with Macs? AFP isn't a necessity but it'd be nice, my house only has Macs in it so it makes sense.

I can't spend all that wedge on the Drobo, the QNAP and Synology solutions seem similarly expensive.

Anyone have any ideas? The Netgear Stora gets mixed reviews. Anyone have a Mac user's perspective on it? How about the ReadyNAS? Anything else I've missed? I'm open to ideas, the main constraint is money. I'm not spending £400 or anything silly like that. Ability to RAID and upgrade the drives is what I'm after mostly. 2 or 4 bay.

Thanks :)
 
I know someone who uses a Synology in a Mac household and loves it. I think it cost about £250 with 2 1TB drives (a boggo twin drive DS211 something?)

How much do you want to spend? (don't forget about running costs, using a old P4 machine will cost £200+ per year in leccy bills over these new NAS machines)
 
HP Proliant Microserver. Thread on it here. You'll have missed out on the Feb cash back offer though. There's two versions. The first version came with a 160GB HDD and the second later version comes with a 250GB.

 
theheyes said:
Do you want reliability, total capacity or performance? i.e. which is more important to you?
Click to expand...

It'll be used for streaming over a wireless network, possibly wired at some point, so as long as it can do that, that's all I'm after. there will be Bluray rips on there though.

I do want the option to have a mirrored RAID on there. What I think I would do at first is mirror it, then if it got filled up possibly back it up manually to a couple of externals and do it concatenated.

The Proliant is cool but more faff than I'm after. The Synology DS211J looks like it might be the ticket though, the price is right certainly. Maybe the DS411J if I can stretch to it.
 
I've got a ReadyNAS Duo, had it a while so there's probably newer/faster out there now. Works via AFP, plenty of community add-ons for things like Newsgroups, Torrents etc and even one that makes it look like a Time Capsule to Time Machine.

I bought it barebones and chucked 2x 1TB drives in, from what I can gather if I want to expand that at some point I can just swap one drive out for a bigger one, let it rebuild and then swap out the other.

Edit: It has got quite a small fan so it's fairly noisy when it's at full pelt, not got anything to compare it to though. Not an issue as it's sat in a spare room.
 
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I use a Qnap 210 with a couple of 1tb drives in, it never crashes and is always up when i access it via AFP :)
 
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