NAS Recomendations ?

Found a couple on aria and know about other sites like ebuyer, dabs, misco etc

but wanted to know what people would recomend as a reliable and decent priced NAS :

ICY BOX IB-NAS-4220-B 2x3.5" SATA HDD

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Compo...roductId=30150

Netgear NAS on aria :

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Perip...roductId=27744

They are around the 100 £ mark and obviously need to purchase a hard drive or two ( just need to also clarify if one hard drive would be enough to start with as obviously can only afford one hard drive for now )

Thanks for any help / advice :)

Ideally you need a NAS with RAID capabilities, likely RAID 1, however this does require you to have two hard drives as raid one function by copy the data to both hard drives such as in the event of one failing you always have a real time back up. With

Regards to actual hard ware recommendations, it does all depend upon your requirements, such as software or network NAS, I.E do you want to access it across the LAN by adding it like a network drive to your PC or software, where you have front end (This is usually used for the non technical foke) I personally wouldn’t suggest getting the software version, as there is usually less to tinker with and toys to play with the background etc, and usually less security.

There are also a range of packages out there for NAS systems; if you get a NAS without software I would use FREENAS

http://www.freenas.org/

This offers a technical front end with all kinds of extra functionality. Check out the website above.

Hope this is of some help.

I've gone one of these babies here at home and it does everything I need:

http://www.adaptec.com/en-GB/product...ap_Server_210/

It cost a lot but believe me it's worth it! 2 x 500GB SATAs Raid1.

DO NOT GET THAT NETGEAR!

and i would stay away from any other NAS units that have their own filesystem

I'd agree with the statment of don't get that Netgear NAS as its not a NAS as such its a Toy really, for the Home Market not enterpise. You want to be looking at the Netgear ReadyNAS units instead - http://www.aria.co.uk/Products?search=readynas

Need something for home around the £200 mark that will allow me to store a fair amount ( hopeing for the 500 gb mark.)

What about that ICY box then ?

Or can someone else point me to a different one as those other nas devices that midget pointed out are out of my price range.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Midget

DO NOT GET THAT NETGEAR!

and i would stay away from any other NAS units that have their own filesystem

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Tell that to netapp customers. :P

You're probably correct when it comes to the cheap and cheerful 'NAS' and how they implement a proprietory filesystem on they're hardware.

I get no end of those bl**dy things coming in that we cant do anything with because they are tied to that one SC101 and if it fails (which they do, alot, esp when updates fail) then there is no way of getting the data back in a useful format.

If you get a NAS, make sure it uses a filesystem you can access without it, be it FAT, NTFS, Ext3 or whatever, but if it has NFS, ZetraFS (as in the SC101) or any other useless filesystem, then avoid.

I'd go the route of a cheap PC (or a miniITX if size is paramount) + FreeNAS myself

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gecko

Need something for home around the £200 mark that will allow me to store a fair amount ( hopeing for the 500 gb mark.)

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I've just bought one of these for £175:

http://www.centralhardware.co.uk/product-912.html

Not a NAS but a direct-attached RAID box (so needs a computer to plug in to - might or might not fit your needs). Fan somewhat noisier than I would have liked, but very robust - I've taken one of the RAID-1 harddrives out and shoved another in and it's carried on playing videos as if nothing happened. You need to supply your own harddrives (£65 each for 500GB ones).

--
David Hicks

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gecko

Need something for home around the £200 mark that will allow me to store a fair amount ( hopeing for the 500 gb mark.)
What about that ICY box then ?

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Like this or are these just for putting drives in to attach to a nas???

I was looking at that one from PC world first but it has it's own software installed and will not share certain files. I just want to use it for backing up 2 macs and 3 windows laptops and the ICY box may do the trick. It would appear there are a few options but I can't see a firewire version?

I have a few external hard disks lying around. Would I just plug them in to that and they would appear as a shared drive on my network (after I have shared them on the NAS)

Darren

Quick change of subject but when I try to do a forum search for NAS, it finds no matches. I know when you search for PC, it says the search term is too small but for NAS, it just says no matches found?

Anyone know why?

Cheers

Im looking at the Netgear ReadyNAS 1.5TB Netgear ReadyNAS 1.5TB NAS Gigabit Network Storage 2x 750GB RAID 0, 1, 5 **£50 Cashback** - Ebuyer and configure it with Raid 5 for storing our software setups and to use as our home dir for the software installer account plus storing backups of the virtual machines I plan to use in the near future.

Few questions though....

Can you set NTFS permissions on these things? Lock it down with file security etc?

Or if not, i've played around with FREENAS and the iscsi initiator for windows and setup a network drive before. Can this be done with any NAS units? If this unit can be used with iscsi then would you plug it directly into an additional network card in the server or just upto the network switches itself?

Thanks for all your help and advice! :) Much appreciated.

Phil;-)