best NAS for under $200.

[judasmachine]

Storage seems to be my weak-point. So I decided I need a network storage device. I want at least 750GB, with 1TB being better if it fits under $200. I was thinkin the low end D-Link on the egg with a caviar green would be good. What do you guys think? I record a lot of TV with my ATI HDTV card and am sick of burning disks, and putting it on usb drives for my netbook.

 

[PuppettMaster001]

I just put the WD My Book 1TB on my Christmas list, it is at Amazon for $169. I have read pretty good things about it.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...=UTF8&coliid=IJCEF9U1RPWCR&colid=TWMEA4N4PRY7

 

[judasmachine]

I just put the WD My Book 1TB on my Christmas list, it is at Amazon for $169. I have read pretty good things about it.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digita...d=TWMEA4N4PRY7

Hmm very interesting. Any experience with that model? It looks good.

 

[wiretap]

If you're looking for just network attached storage, don't waste money on these units that are a hard drive enclosure with an ethernet port. They can't handle much throughput because the onboard processor is weak as hell.

For strict network storage, go with something like unRAID or FreeNAS. You can build one with cheap or spare computer components you have laying around and boot the OS from a thumbdrive. Just throw your hard drives in and go.. it's really easy. The storage expandability is pretty much as many sata/ide ports as you have, and throughput is fast depending on what lan speed and disk speed you have.

 

[Zap]

The Intel entry level NAS server seems an interesting, well performing and expandable product. There's a hot deal thread on it. Most of the deals are dead, but it can give you some ideas. It uses a socket 775 Celeron 420 (basically "Core Solo") with a stick of DDR2 and an Intel gigabit ethernet controller. It has four internal SATA ports matched to drive bays and two eSATA ports. It is really small for being able to hold four hard drives. Newegg has had them for $150 with free shipping twice recently, and some other place that sells on Buy.com marketplace and eBay (along with their own store - but think Bing Cashback here) has had a rebranded version for $135. This is without hard drives.

Note that IIRC you have to install hard drives in matched pairs for it to function with the default OS.

 

[RebateMonger]

No matter what you end up using, be sure to consider if/how you will be backing it up. Hard disks and RAID arrays DO fail. I wouldn't trust any really important data to a single disk, array, or other storage device.

If you want the highest reliability and throughput, you'd be best off adding an internal disk to a PC and making that available to the network. External hard disks seem to be much more failure-prone than internal disks, probably because of overheating and accidental bumps and drops. The power supplies of external boxes seem to fail a lot, too.

 

[judasmachine]

Actually after looking around I realized I still have a complete PC that might work. It's an AthlonXP 2600+ system with 1GB DDR. I just need a large HDD for it.

 

[BTA]

MSI Wind Nettop + 2 hard drives of your choice + small USB thum drive + FreeNAS is what I built, works great.

2 drives setup as a mirrored array

 

[pjkenned]

The power supplies of external boxes seem to fail a lot, too.

I actually had an external (Vantec brand) 5.25" enclosure where the PS was super loud... very happy when the PS died after 3 months of use.

I will say a heavy 4U + the Antec 1kw ps is a nice setup.

OP: You Athlon will probably work fine. If it is too loud, for like $80 you can get the dual Atom core Intel ITX board, add a hard drive + enclosure, and do a sub-$200 freeNAS/ Openfiler.

 

[judasmachine]

OP: You Athlon will probably work fine. If it is too loud, for like $80 you can get the dual Atom core Intel ITX board, add a hard drive + enclosure, and do a sub-$200 freeNAS/ Openfiler.

Nah the fan on it is surprisingly quiet. It was my g/f's old rig, and she had the guy that built it, build it kind of quiet.

specs: (off the top of my head)

athlonxp 2600
asus nForce2 mATX
2x512MB DDR PC3200
160GB HDD (gonna be repaced or augmented with 1TB drive)
16x DVD burner
400w PSU

 

[Yellowbeard]

Nah the fan on it is surprisingly quiet. It was my g/f's old rig, and she had the guy that built it, build it kind of quiet.

specs: (off the top of my head)

athlonxp 2600
asus nForce2 mATX
2x512MB DDR PC3200
160GB HDD (gonna be repaced or augmented with 1TB drive)
16x DVD burner
400w PSU

Sounds like a good plan and, I've been very happy using FreeNAS. But, as noted above, unless you are willing/able to lose your data, I'd suggest a RAID-1 setup. FWIW, my FreeNAS OS is running off a 1GB flash drive so no wasted disk space. FreeNAS won't allow you to use the disk where the OS resides for data so you'll need to use that entire 160GB drive for a 32MB OS kernel or use a flash drive, SD card or similar.