How to set up my home network & what NAS to get...??

[Flibb]

Am also looking for a new home NAS that must support RAID. Also have a PS3. Would love to hear recommendations particularly around NAS and PS3 compatibility. I am considering stuff like:

1. Netgear's RND2000 ReadyNAS (£130)
2. Icy Box IB-NAS5220-B (£110)
3. 1TB Buffalo Linkstation Duo 2xSata NAS (£156)

HDD's are cheap. £33 delivered for a 500GB drive for example.

HTH,
-Mez

I use an RND2000 on my home network, it shares media and stores backups for 2 desktops, 2 laptops, and my xbox 360. PCs, 360, NAS are wired to a gigabit switch, this is then connected to a netgear dg834GT adsl router that handles the laptops, my network printer is also plugged in to the Dg834GT. All in all it works perfectly, no problems serving media, no dropouts, pretty near plug and play. If your looking at any of the readynas boxes, keep an eye open for when they do the free hard drive offer, you have to send a barcode and for to netgear, took about 5 dys for the drive to turn up.

[Jiff Lemon]

Thanks for the tip about the re-write Jiff - any idea when the new version will be out? it seems silly to fork out for the current version if there is a newer one about to come out!!

details here about the next version

Oh and there's absolutely nothing to stop you have a raid array underneath the home server and not using drive extender. Or you could have the whole thing virtualised too.

[cocksy_boy]

details here about the next version

Oh and there's absolutely nothing to stop you have a raid array underneath the home server and not using drive extender. Or you could have the whole thing virtualised too.

Hi Jiff,

Thanks for the link, it seems there are no plans for full RAID support.

I understand what you mean about running raid underneath, but I presume there would not there be any software support or drivers for the home server windows, so it would be very difficult to manage the RAID setup - especially remotely?

Also, running it in a virtual environment is a potential solution, but then I've got to run an OS on top of an OS and it kind of takes away from the 'low power, low spec' requirements of the NAS / dedicated home server.

I'm kind of still torn between the two!! I have seen a page which talks about installing the beta version of home server in a virtual environment to test it which I think i might give a go, just to see what its like. Shame I can't do that with a dedicated NAS box!

I'll be having a look on ebay to see if there are any NAS's going second hand, but I think they might be quite expensive compared to the new ones, so might as well go for a new one!

As for the switch, is there any reason why this one shouldn't be OK?

[cocksy_boy]

So, I decided to give the WHS vail a go, and as I dont have the spare hardware available, I decided to give it a go on a virtual machine.

Using the instructions here and here, I installed VM ware workstation and got the beta installed - it failed first time, but worked the second. The problem I have is that I can't get it to conncet (bridge) from the virtual machine to my actual network - it keeps coming uwith the IP address conflict error saying the IP address is already in use on my network. As far as I can tell its not, but I'm new to all this!!

I've tried to use the virtual network editor, but I've had no luck - i've since set it back to the defaults:



Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to get this going? Many thanks!