Noob Help on NAS

[ydekmekji]

I'm thinking of asking for a simple, run of the mill NAS drive for Christmas to store all of our music, pictures and recordings.

1. What would you recommend (under $200 US)?
2. Will i be able to record straight to the NAS?
3. Is it easy and of good quality to stream videos remotely?

Thanks!

[aa4hg]

I bought a DLink DNS-321 for net storage. I find it very slow. I also have found it not to be the most reliable piece of equipment I've ever bought, either. While it stacks up better than the Linksys counterpart, they have a long way to go.

If you want a net storage device that works, find an old PC on Ebay, say an IBM 8781 with 500MB of RAM or more, and put a couple of drives in it. The OS will handle RAID-0 & RAID-1 without any modifications. Throw it over in the corner and forget about it.
You'll spend less on the used IBM computer than on either of the NAS boxes I've mentioned, anyway.

One other thing, the Dlink box claims to have an FTP Server built in. Don't make the mistake of thinking it will work well. It doesn't.

YMMV

Scott

[pz1]

It depends very much on your needs what you take. If it is only extra disk capacity for your multimedia server, you might consider external USB disks. Much cheaper than the equivalent NAS.
For off site storage/backup, I bought a Synology 207. It can hold two drives in a number of configurations. It is a bit slow for me as a NAS, but integrates easily in my Active Directory environment. I did consider using an old PC for the job, but I choose against it because of much higher power consumption.

[herbs]

I use an atom 330 board (I think they are under $100 US), it has a gigabit nic on board and can be used as a client if you wanted to (if you use windows). I'm not sure if a gigabit connection is fast enough for your recordings (I suspect it will be).

My system with 2Gb ram and 2x 500Gb drives cost approx £170, I had a spare case and brought a cheap 4 port sata card, so your mileage may vary. See this and this for some info.

[Fatman_do]

I wounder why these devices have such slow transfer times?

I have this..
http://www.simpleshare.com/

Its ok, just not much. I bought it at CircuitCity last year for $50.

[gazoo]

I have a DNS-323 from D-Link. It is totally awesome, and is very quick (has a 1000BT capable nic). I don't know if I would make a NAS a recording drive, but I do use it to store many of my videos and it works fine, even with 1080P .mkvs Streaming rates are about 18Mbps for 1080p (I think if memory serves me right), my wireless can even keep up - but that's just reading, not recording or anything of that sort.