Sort of a Spec me a NAS thread...

[-BA-]

...but really struggling to decide whether I go down a cheap route like:

ReadyNAS Duo RND2100, 2110 or 2120 which works out at c. £270 max for 4GB of storage (inc. redeemed drive).

Or the more expensive route:

Synology DS410J which is £266 alone for the unit and then I would need 4 drives to populate it.

Clearly the Synology is a far superior setup but a few questions answered about the cheaper Netgear setup might still sway me.

1. Do you have a choice of what brand of hard drive is shipped as the bundled drive?

2. Do Netgear match the drive model like for like when you redeem the free drive?

Ultimately I am looking at £500+ for a Synology 4 disk raid 5 setup and not quite sure if I can justify that yet but don't want to regret it further down the line if I take the cheaper option.

All input welcome

 

[Zarf]

Build your own tbh, £250 gets you a decent, quiet base unit and you can run FreeNAS or Openfiler. In fact you could probably pick up an old Athlon X2 system for around £50 with plenty of available SATA ports. Performance will be at least as good as any of these embedded devices form Synology or Netgear, and you have far more flexibility to expand in the future.

If you need top performance then pick up an Intel gigabit NIC and second hand Perc 5/i on the bay.

My Athlon X2 server with Perc 5/i cost me around £300 to put together back in 2007, including fancy extras like an Antec 900 case and hotswap bays - I'm running 8 drives in hardware Raid5 and can transfer in either direction at 100 MegaBytes/s to my Windows 7 machines. On the server itself I get 4-500MB/s throughput which makes my VM's and RAR extracts fly.

It's easy enough to build something small and quiet too, if that's the route you wanted to go down.

 

[deuse]

I have got a LG N2R1 with built in dvd writer and 2x 500gig drives it came with.
You also can get one with a built in Bluray writer. They are going cheap at the mow.

http://www.cdrlabs.com/Reviews/lg-n2r1dd2-2tb-super-multi-nas-with-dvd-rewriter.html

Also I am using a hacked firmware that does loads more.

http://lg.threnor.de/?action=index&lang=en

 

[KIA]

My vote goes to the Synology.

 

[Duke]

My vote goes to the Synology.

Same here, very nice units. Building your own is fine but they will be an ugly pc box which are difficult to hide.

 

[-BA-]

I must confess I probably have enough hardware to build four of my own units but really didn't want to go down that route. The Synology route is sooooo tempting but so damn pricey. Gah decisions decisions.