NAS Solution

[Professor Frink]

Got a shared house with 2 mate and thinking about buying a NAS for house sharing and avoid duplications over our three PCs and a couple of laptops.

I was thinking of either:
Data Robotics Drobo Storage Robot v2
Thecus N0503

Both are similar price (within about £10). The Drobo says it will support up to 16Gb compared to the 6Gb the Thecus supports. Although I think the Thecus has more hardware behind it because it has a Intel Atom and 1Gb of DDR2 and maybe more support/ options?

I would be buying the NAS and then putting a 2Tb deskstar in to start with and then maybe another in a couple of month or adding a 1Tb hard drive from my main rig. So there wouldn't be any raid options because of the miss match in size on the Thecus (if I go that option) but I've heard that the Drobo doesn't care about different drive sizes.

What do people think?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Got a shared house with 2 mate and thinking about buying a NAS for house sharing and avoid duplications over our three PCs and a couple of laptops.

I was thinking of either:
Data Robotics Drobo Storage Robot v2
Thecus N0503

Both are similar price (within about £10). The Drobo says it will support up to 16Gb compared to the 6Gb the Thecus supports. Although I think the Thecus has more hardware behind it because it has a Intel Atom and 1Gb of DDR2 and maybe more support/ options?

I would be buying the NAS and then putting a 2Tb deskstar in to start with and then maybe another in a couple of month or adding a 1Tb hard drive from my main rig. So there wouldn't be any raid options because of the miss match in size on the Thecus (if I go that option) but I've heard that the Drobo doesn't care about different drive sizes.

What do people think?

With an NAS get the one with the most powerful CPU and most RAM otherwise it will take hours for RAID creation and also a lack of CPU power will affect the speed of file transfers.

[12GaugeShotty]

I wouldn't get a NAS to stick a single drive in it. May as well get a USB hard drive for that. If you get a NAS, ensure to fill it up for redundancy (RAID 5).

[Professor Frink]

I wouldn't get a NAS to stick a single drive in it. May as well get a USB hard drive for that. If you get a NAS, ensure to fill it up for redundancy (RAID 5).

USB attached hard drive does not help me share files to multiple machines.

[Professor Frink]

I was just reading some reviews of the Drobo and they were mentioning it has a quite loud fan. This might be a problem because I will be leaving it on 24/7 in my room next to the router.

Also I'm not too bothered about raid 5/ redundancy and read the Drobo does eat a very lot of storage for redundancy and future expansion.

[kmac]

USB attached hard drive does not help me share files to multiple machines.

You can attach the drive to a router with a USB port - such as the Draytek Vigor 2710n or the Draytek Vigor 2820n

I've just built a NAS based on a E5200CPU and mini-ITX mobo runnign FreeNAS. If you want speed, i suggest you upgrade all the network cards to gigabit and get a gigabit switch

[smargh]

Remember: RAID is not a backup solution in itself, unless the data stored is the backup.