lately I've been thinking about investing in a NAS drive for my long-term file needs (primarily videos/music that I'd want to stream to my xbox 360 or share with my roommate, without having to power on my desktop or drag down my bandwidth when I'm trying to work from home and my roommate wants to stream blue-ray quality files from my internal drives)... I'm also trying to downsize my desktop to fit into a smaller chassis, and removing my "data" drives would be a nice help.
(currently, my system is 2 x SSD's in a RAID1 and 2 x 2TB sata drives in a RAID1... by default, all downloads go to a "temp" folder on the SSD's and then get copied over to the sata array if I decide it's something worth keeping)
the root of my question is, though... anyone have any recommendations on a diskless NAS that won't totally destroy my budget? my minimum requirements are 2 drives, RAID1 supported, and 2-3TB drives supported (obv, the more drives the better and 4 would be ideal, but I'm not quite willing to invest +$1k into a storage array right now)
fwiw, my router has gb ethernet and a usb 2.0 port, so I think I'd be good with either interface... my xbox is wireless now, but I think if/when I start using it for more streaming, I'll suck it up and run a physical ethernet cable to it since it's in the same room as my router anyways.
edit: after a couple hours researching, seems like Synology is a pretty solid brand?
I'm debating if it's worth paying an extra $180 to upgrade from the DS212j to the DS413j... I don't necessarily need 6TB capacity (assuming 4 x 3TB drives in a RAID10), but it could be cool to just not have to worry about space.
anyone know if upgrades after the fact are possible, or would I have to use third party software if I bought a 4-drive unit with 2 drives now and then wanted to add an additional 2 drives down the road if/when space becomes an issue?
edit 2: based on the Synology wiki (google cache because their site seems hosed right now), I'd need to use "hybrid raid" and only get 1 disk redundancy, but I could throw 2 x 3TB drives plus 2 drives of whatever capacity I have laying around and then later upgrade those 2 drives to 3TB too as needed.
(currently, my system is 2 x SSD's in a RAID1 and 2 x 2TB sata drives in a RAID1... by default, all downloads go to a "temp" folder on the SSD's and then get copied over to the sata array if I decide it's something worth keeping)
the root of my question is, though... anyone have any recommendations on a diskless NAS that won't totally destroy my budget? my minimum requirements are 2 drives, RAID1 supported, and 2-3TB drives supported (obv, the more drives the better and 4 would be ideal, but I'm not quite willing to invest +$1k into a storage array right now)
fwiw, my router has gb ethernet and a usb 2.0 port, so I think I'd be good with either interface... my xbox is wireless now, but I think if/when I start using it for more streaming, I'll suck it up and run a physical ethernet cable to it since it's in the same room as my router anyways.
edit: after a couple hours researching, seems like Synology is a pretty solid brand?
I'm debating if it's worth paying an extra $180 to upgrade from the DS212j to the DS413j... I don't necessarily need 6TB capacity (assuming 4 x 3TB drives in a RAID10), but it could be cool to just not have to worry about space.
anyone know if upgrades after the fact are possible, or would I have to use third party software if I bought a 4-drive unit with 2 drives now and then wanted to add an additional 2 drives down the road if/when space becomes an issue?
edit 2: based on the Synology wiki (google cache because their site seems hosed right now), I'd need to use "hybrid raid" and only get 1 disk redundancy, but I could throw 2 x 3TB drives plus 2 drives of whatever capacity I have laying around and then later upgrade those 2 drives to 3TB too as needed.
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