There are four types of NAS products to choose from. What's your preference?

i personally have a multi BYOD type since it allows for greater flexibility and i also needed RAID 5 which you can't do with a single disk solution.

FYI
my nas

Intel SS4000-E
4x250GB Segate Sata II in Raid 5

I tried them all, wel almost

First I tried the NetGear box: Nice looking box, but not more then a toy, slow and no Mac support.


Next up:
Thecus YES Box: Performance was not to bad but anything bigger then 50MB got really slow. Seems to me like an Intel problem. But the other major concearn is it gets so hot you think your drives are going to melt so returned it.

Then I figured I better do things right and go for the Intel SS4000 at least this one has a RAID. But I guess you shouldn't want to put anything bigger then 50MB on there because just like the Thecus box it was so slow I could probably out perform it by using a floppy drive.

Copying 10GB takes almost 2 hours. Thats terrible, copying exactly the same data from my mac to the Pc takes 5 minutes on the same GB LAN. So returned that one.

For some reason I figured it is probably easier to just build a simple PC with a RAID 5 and GB LAn then get some of these BYOD setups, they cost about the same. The only advantage is they are a lot smaller and that makes them more portable.

My last attempt seems to be OK:

The Synology 106e: Decent speeds, some nice features and Mac OsX support. But life is not perfect: it becomes noisy after a while i think it suffers from not enought memory. A box with this many features should have upgradable RAM or at least 64MB preferably 128MB.

So perhaps the Qnap one should the box I really need... but you know what? I got really tired of trying out all these "BETA" products. Your better of turning an old 1GHZ PC with onboard RAID into a NAS then try any of these so called clever devices.

I own a Snap2200 with 2 x 300gig RAID 1.

It's by no means the fastest unit. But it has a lot of good features going for it. It's a small compact unit. Suports all file files sytems. It's Quite. The OS is well polished. And easy to setup.

I have thought about building a raid 5 system for speed, Using FreeNAS as the frontend. The Problem is NOISE. By the time you cool them (4-8 drives) you have a noise box, generating a lot of heat. My PC room is already the hotest in the house.

Infrant all the way!

I had a nice powerful DIY NAS but was a bit worried with the way the Linux kernel ID's SATA drives. If one failed, I would have a hard time physically telling which one it was. So I kept my Linux server to a pair of 750G drives (for fast file access) and got an infrant 1100. Nice and reliable, and the X-RAID is really great.

Of course, the infrant can't even try to match the DIY linux server for performance, but for large stuff like home movies and backups, it's great.