So my backup external hard drive kicked the bucket last night (or this morning, hard to tell when). Had it for almost 2 years, so I am not terribly surprised, just ticked that I now have to reprioritize the electronics budget accordingly.

I have been interested in picking up a NAS drive, and thought you all might have some suggestions. In all honesty, I would prefer to spend as little as possible, while still getting at least a reliable terrabyte. It doesn't have to be wireless itself, an ethernet connection is absolutely fine. Remote access would be a huge plus, but if it bumps the price up a lot then it's not tantamount.

Any suggestions? You all have yet to fail me with your technical prowess!

- Sam

I've been very interested in the NetGear/Infrant ReadyNAS units, but they certainly are on the high end of things. Drobo's also fascinating, but that's on the extreme high end, especially when you buy the bit to make it a NAS. The reviews on Amazon on the other brands tend to give me pause, though.

I've been interested in the Drobo for quite awhile as well. I can't figure out why the Amazon reviews are all over the place as well, but it's also caused me to hold off on purchasing....

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=42543767

It'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!

The Buffalo only uses SMB, right? Or does it have full AFP and NFS servers?

Peter, thank you very much for that link, it's pretty much exactly the level of sophistication I am looking for in my NAS. I'll put in an order.

Just so other people can benefit, for those of you looking for more advanced features and capacity, I read great things about the Synology DS209+ NAS server. Minus the harddrives, you can find them online new for around $315 US. If it was in my budget, I think that's where my money would go.

I also liked the Drobo setup, but I really am looking for extended capacity rather than true backup capability. The files I'm backing up are really more of a convenience thing rather than a work necessity. That said, the Drobo system seems like it would put my mind at ease if data backup was my main concern.

Thanks for the help everyone.

Golden,
If it's not too late here's another option for you. D-Link DNS-323. I have been running one for a year or so now and have had few issues - all of which have been fixed in the latest firmware update.

It's not on the same level as the Synology, but it's pretty good for the money and works well with the PS3.

I also use it as an FTP server to access my personal files as I travel more than 50% of my time for work - that also works well.

Dan, that's pretty similar to the Synology, for nearly $100 less. Still, I actually went with the Buffalo - at $67US + shipping it was too inexpensive a fit to pass up. My plans for a future SACD player are now still intact!

EDIT: man, I leave a lot of very important words out of sentances...

Time Capsule is nice but it's pricey and adds a router which you may not need.

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to have a Drobo but you have to pay extra for the sled (for LAN connection). It's also expensive.

The next one I would look at is the HP Media Vault line. There's the cheaper MediaSmart Server which is a 2 bay version. I've lots of positive reviews on that one.

After that, Buffalo might be nice. I know some of them are hackable, making them a bit more valuable.

I built my own NAS. after a ebay purchase of buffalo NAS, ended in an empty box showing up, i configured an old desktop into the NAS.

It has been working good and works good with PS3 and HTPC. It has remote access, FTP, DLNA.

http://www.freenas.org

Regs,
Avi

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!