Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler disaster strikes...

Ah, that explains it. I've been looking at multi-drive units. No wonder these are so much cheaper...

Good suggestion if you have free machine somewhere. If it's a desktop, you could build a RAID with a few drives and a SATA controller card.

My problem with freenas is that you're still going to be using a lot more power than one of the purpose built ones, especially if the purpose built ones support drive spindown.

That is a good buy.
I was reading some reviews of the Buffalo units in a mag awhile back and if i recall they had some really slow transfer rate issues but otherwise a good bundle.

I've been considering getting a NAS for our home system as well so i can more easily and quickly backup all the home computers or store media files.
I once contemplated doing a backup to DVD and decided i must be nuts. However, one or two Bluray discs would fit the bill for backups so ...which to choose?

Granted the NAS could offer more and automatic backup utilities compared to the manual bluray burning option. But the NAS i cannot take out of the house for safe keeping very easily either.

Hmm, tradeoffs...just like in finding that perfect audio speaker...

So my Buffalo LinkStation EZ has arrived and I am starting to play around with it. For the price ($66), I am very happy. I would note though, that it definitely has a relatively slow transfer rate of around ~2.1 Mb/s, so the initial data upload of around 85GB took well over a full night. Like I siad though, for the price I am very happy.

Next up I will try upgrading the firmware and seeing about remote connectivity. If I can get that working, I'll consider this a steal. Again, thanks to Peter for pointing it out!

Happy to be of service. I'm glad it's working out for you.

On this same front, I recently bought a Macbook and I wanted something that would let me do network Time Machine backups. The Time Capsules are sweet, but I really didn't want to spend $300 right now. So, based on my success with that LinkStation EZ, I picked up another refurb Buffalo (again, from eCost).

I snagged a refurb 500GB LS-CH500L ( Buffalo Linkstation Live) for about $100. A little more than the EZ, for the same amount of space.

While the EZ was/is great; simple & easy to use and just works, this CH500L blows it out of the water in terms of what it can do.

Not only does the CH500L work perfectly with Time Machine (the primary reason I wanted it), it also has a myriad of features that the EZ doesn't have:

• DNLA & iTunes Music server (Xbox, PS3, iTunes, etc)
• FTP server
• SMB + AppleTalk shares
• Full customizations for workgroup, users + groups, IP addresses, etc
• Full web access (to be fair, the EZ appears to have this too - added by the latest firmware)
• Bittorrent Client (way cool, no need to leave a computer running to snag a torrent)
• external USB hard drive support (shows up as a network share, can be an auto-backup location, and can do a mass data-pull from the drive)
• Email status & alert reports
• USB print server support.

And it's faster than the EZ in copying files - same gigabit router, same source/destination machines, same files. My 100GB media collection also took overnight to copy to the EZ (wired gigabit), which is far too long if everything were really working at gigabit speeds. The same collection took about 4 hours to upload to the CHL. Still not quite up to true Gigabit speeeds (I think). I need to tinker a bit with jumbo frame support, as it appears the CHL supports it, as does my switch & Macbook. That might make a difference.

But for comparison sake, on my Vista machine that collection takes about 2 hours to copy to/from an external USB 2.0 hard drive. On the same Vista machine running Ubuntu or on my Macbook Pro, it takes about 45 minutes. Go figure.

But the CHL is also extremely quiet. The EZ's fan runs 24/7 (mine, anyway) and it's noticable. Not so on the CHL. I can barely hear it if I put my noise to the chassis.

They're both great NAS's. The EZ is such a cinch to setup. But the CHL is definitely a step above in terms of features. I highly recommend them both.

And yes, I've now got 1 TB of NAS storage at home. Nerd.

I had remembered as few people expressing interest in the Drobo NAS, but that it was a bit expensive. There appears to be a decent (relatively speaking) sale currently at this website, if anyone was still on the market. The sale is really a pre-paid Visa card rebate, but still $50 less than anywhere else I happened across the NAS.

Unfortunately, that's just the storage box--the NAS option is an additional $200, I think. Still, thanks for the tip!