OT/FOAK NAS

Not being doing much more than lurking since we got back from holiday as
both my father and Horse have been in and out of hospital. However I now
have a question completely unrelated to motorcycles so it's to UKRM that
I of course turn...

I was just about to migrate to a new PC and wondered if the time was now
right to split the doing stuff and archiving data stuff functions; i.e.
put the music and photo collections somewhere other than the PC and just
make the PC a glorified netbook

So, the thought is to put together a NAS box with two disks in a RAID1
configuraton. But that's as far as the thought process has gone. I like
the idea of an iTunes server/ftp server/web server/media server/teasmade
but I'm not sure if such things are sufficiently simple and
future-resistant to make them worthwhile.

So, I'd appreciate recommendations from those that have one; prices for
the bare boxes with similar capabilities seem to range from about £50 to
£150, and it's not clear if the pricier ones are better or the cheaper
ones are simply less expensive.

Help!

 

I just used and old pc with a hardware raid card in it and two 1Tb
drives. I use remote desktop from my laptop to play music. Media Monkey
is much better than iTunes for organising and tagging. Use decent
quality signal cable if your music machine is a long wasy from the stereo.

 

Done some testing with a QNAP TS210 recently, and it does what it says
it does.

Nice little unit, just over the top of you're budget by about £20, but
worth it in my opinion.

Thecus make some very nice boxes as well.

 

Looks really nice but lacks the media center functionality.

Any suggestion of a network media center that can play all the stuff
stored in such a NAS? PS3, not.

 

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?cat=30

 

"Plays content from a network drive", nice.

 

I'd rather blow the budget by £20 than spend hours trying to get the
frigging thing to work though.

The Raid implementation seems a bit odd though; I'd assume that if I put
a second disk in that the system would automagically mirror the full
disk rather than requiring them both to be empty and for me to start
again. Hmmm

 

I've got one of these:

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509

Maybe a little out of your price range (as you need to purchase disks apart)
but it's the dogs nads and very, very good.

Stay away from any NAS from Netgear. They're shite.

 

I've sung the praises of the WD HD Live box before, outstanding cheap
solution, better IMHO than an all in one storage solution.

I've got a LaCie 2Big NAS, I like it a lot. Familiar rights model (I deploy
one in our office). Bonjour service. FTP access through the firewall, looks
bombproof, works perfectly.

 

That was the one that got me wondering about price/performance as it was
about the same spec as the Netgear one but about 80 notes more.

Ah right, that'll be it.

 

AOL that's why I stuck an Adaptec raid card in my music machine; if it
goes tits up I can get another compatible card and rebuild the array. I
am NOT redigitising 150Gb of mp3s

 

Wouldn't archiving it be a lot cheaper and quicker, given the ludicrous
cost of hard drives these days?

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