NAS - recommendations please

[Dave Hall]

On Mon, 2008-08-11 at 14:03 +1000, Sebastian wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> for a while now I've been looking into buying a NAS for the growing
> amount of data.
> 
> I was thinking of something like QNAP TS-209 Pro
> [http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30181/75/]
> but as funds are short and the need for storage is pressing I was
> thinking that there should be a less expensive solution out there
> which still does the job sufficiently.
> 
> When I look as e.g. Officeworks I can get a external 3,5'' drive with
> 500GB for less than 150$

Officeworks isn't offering a NAS, it is offering a USB to IDE/SATA
adaptor and drive.  If this is all you need, you can get them cheaper.

> So is there a decent NAS out there which brings ~500GB and is still  ~200$ ??

For a NAS to a certain extent you get what you pay for.  I am not saying
go all out and buy a nexis from SGI [1] - even though it is nice kit
(disclaimer I contracted to SGI for a while).

You can get something cheap, but will it grow with your needs?  Does it
support RAID-1 (mirroring)?  Does it support snapshot and other advanced
functionality that you might grow into?

For similar price to the QNAP you could get a VIA based barebones box
which you can load up with a couple of disks and install openfiler on it
[2].  

I am yet to find an affordable NAS appliance that comes close to
openfiler.  I have 1.5Tb RAID-1 being served up by OF in my office here
and it works a treat.  In about 30mins you should have a basic install
sharing files in your house.  It can even be a PDC and an LDAP Server.
The only downside - it isn't ubuntu based.

Cheers

Dave

[1] http://www.sgi.com/products/storage/nas/nexis/

[2] http://openfiler.org