I went with Synology. The reason was that they have one of the best user interface out there.
But sadly, to get a synology, you have to pay for it. I have had a USB and a Firewire hooked up drive. but the fatal flaw with them is:
1. they are only hooked up to one machine and only work when they are hooked up.
2. they tend to be proprietary in the way they work that locks you into their solution
3. was a single point of failure as there was no redundancy within it's solution.
4. look at point #1 again.
The reason I went NAS was that it's just there. it allows for me to forget it was there and automate a backup function so it worked without me needing to remember to do something. I wanted something that will give me the solution beyond just what I needed now but could also do the level that I could grow into. I wanted stability and expandability that was not tied into a propriety package.
if I was going with a USB solution, I WOULD NOT get a plug in drive case.. buy something like this:
http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=14_679&item_id=068681what do you need a case for.. it's just extra packaging. You need a dock that a hard drive plugs into to put the data onto the drive. full stop.
But it only works when you remember to back up your data, and there is ZERO drive redundancy. it's just a point in time backup that is a second copy.
Once you put in a Mirror (RAID 1) then when you copy to that drive, the backup is sort of backed up to cover you for disk failure. But that only covers the side of hardware fault. If you need to hook up a drive to backup, then you still have the human error of forgetfullness to deal with. It its always there, then you can automate so that your computer wakes up by itself and backs up without you needing to do anything.
Just something to think about.
