NAS unit for home?

[wilsonian]

Hello,

I've been out of the PC "race" for about 3 years and most of my kit is pretty old P4/Athlon XP technology. Recently my file server (an XP 2100) started throwing up errors and I think the motherboard is on it's way. I'm using this as an excuse to purchase a NAS unit as I beleive it'll save me on power and the footprint. Only problem is this file server has about 1.5TB of HD's in it.

While looking around I've seen several units in my price range however I'm unsure what to purchase. Would it be possible to buy a 2TB NAS unit for less than £200?

[Jay]

Do you want to reuse your HDDs? Do you want RAID?

[CrimsonAvenger]

I think you could probably do it for less than £200 but you'd get poor performance from the £100ish NAS units.

Spend a bit more and get decent performance.

I'd recommend the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo for about £145 with a free 500Gb drive. Full SPEC below.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Netge...AS-(Empty-Case)

Claim the free drive, sell it, buy 2 x 1Tb Samsung 103UJs for £56 each.

Getting close to your £200 price then too

[wilsonian]

thanks for the replies. I don't want to re-use the HD's has I have about 5 160gb HD's and a few 300's so a NAS unit that can take that many will cost a fortune.

The Netgear device looks promising as it can double up as a print server too. Only thing is I can't find a HD compatiblitly list.

[CrimsonAvenger]

http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=82

[slypie]

The only advice I can give is stay away from enclosed NAS drives as if they go belly up and you want to retreive your data you void the warranty if you open it up. I bought a Maxtor Shared Storage II drive and 3 have failed on me (the longest lasting 10 months). Whilst Maxtor's customer service is very good the device is very poor as they swapped it with a Central Axis and that failed as well.

Also stick to the big names and don't be tempted buying generic rubbish and make sure the drives work with the NAS device you buy as I bought one and found my Samsung drives failed over and over again. To be honest for a good NAS with 2GB RAID 5 (3 x 1GB Drives) for Redundancy your looking at around £350-400. At the end of the day only you can put a price on your data.

If you do buy an enclosed NAS drive make sure you also buy an external hard drive of the same size and back it up to that as well. I personally think it's best to keep your data backed up twice anyways.

[CrimsonAvenger]

The ReadyNAS are standard units with a caddy for each.

No problems with replacing if needed.