Hey, at least it was just your backup and not your 'work' drive!
Easy enough to replace (relatively).
I recently decided that I wanted a NAS for my home network too. After shopping around a bit, I found a Buffalo Linkstation LS-L500GL on clearance for about $65 from eCost. 500GB, 7200RPM SATA drive, Gigabit NIC. Couldn't beat that price. Yes, they're a couple of years old and discontinued. But they're cheap. And there's a firmware update that improved the performance and apparently gives it the ability to do remote access over the WAN connection (over the internet), though I have not tried it to confirm that it works.
http://www.ecost.com/detail.aspx?edp=425...ci_sku=42543767It's working quite well and I'm very pleased with it, especially for the price. It's very stable - I've just rebooted it once, after the firmware update. It's been running for months. It has worked perfectly for my Vista, XP, Windows7, OSX, and Ubuntu machines. I bought it for backup purposes, but have quickly discovered how nice it is to have one centralized spot to share files. Very handy - especially if you're like me and like to build/rebuild machines all the time.
The only problem with it is that it doesn't allow you very much in the way of customization. It basically just shows up on your network as part of the 'WORKGROUP' workgroup, with a 'Share' folder. That's about it. You can, of course, make whatever subfolders under the 'Share' that you want. But the workgroup is fixed, which can cause some headaches for certain situations. I've also seen complaints on forums that its version of whatever Linux filesystem that it uses can't handle some non-standard characters that Vista/OSX can, which has resulted in a few folks complaining of problems with their MP3 collections. I have had no such problems. Its fan is also pretty loud. Loud enough that you probably wouldn't want to keep it somewhere where silence is valued - like in a bedroom or a HT room. It's also
NOT compatible with Time Machine on OSX, if that's of any concern to you.
From my positive experience with it, I'd say to take a peek at all of the Buffalo LinkStation offerings. Their LinkStation Mini is the successor to the one I have, and it's available in both 500GB and 1TB versions, and seems to have a lot more features.
Good luck!
