FreeNAS, NAS or External Drive?

Hey,

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with NAS systems.

I just want to be able to mainly backup certain drives on my computer. I’m looking for a 500gig to 1tb solution for less than £300!

I was thinking of using FreeNAS, as then I would be able to change any drives in the long run and have endless configuration options and backup my data however the power consumption would be far higher than if I brought I a dedicated NAS system.

However with most dedicated NAS systems it seems that I can't change the hard drives unless I’m paying for systems in the £700 range I mean if I’m wrong could someone link me to a NAS system that would allow me to use my own drives?

Then there are external usb drives, I was wondering if there are external cases with network support? That would be a deffo plus but it looks like this is the cheapest solution to backing my data but space would be limited and it just doesn’t feel safe as using a RAID base system.

Anyway, I would love to hear with your experiences with NAS systems and backing up data.

http://scan.co.uk/Products/ProductIn...oductID=405129
NAS + USB

I would say just buy a Seagate FreeAgent external drive for backup.

Single User environment + Backup -> Does not need 7x24 -> NAS not required.

If you don't trust RAID, just buy two drives and do two near-identical sets of backups. For £300 you could buy almost 2x750GB FreeAgent drives which included backup software :)

One thing is, you already BACKED up your data (assuming you buy 1 drive), in case either your main computer hdd or the backup hdd failed you still have a copy. So the RAID is irreverent to your purpose.

If you meant Archiving of your old data then it is a different matter.

The FreeAgent drives look amazing i have to say but yea i was also thinking of archiving my data too.

I just doubt the performance of these usb drives when storing large files and such.

Thanks again for the help!