In search of the "perfect NAS"

[vpr]

Hello, I'm in need of some assistance in trying to find the perfect nas for my needs... Here is what I need:

• 2-4 Bay Pref. Hot-swapable
• Low Power Consumption
• Capable of streaming HD files and possibly doing 2 operations without stuttering/loss of frame rate (stream HD movie to one computer while playing music at another for example)
• compatible with both PC and MAC
• Able to stream to multiple devices such as Xbox/PS3, etc
• Included Bittorrent client (either through addon or default) capable of using an RSS feed - I currently use MIRO and uTorrent w/ RSS to download multiple podcasts/video casts across the net and would like to mitigate having to leave a power-hungry PC on all the time - This is the most important feature.
• Some form of Data Protection so if one HD goes bad I won't loose data (similar to how Drobo works I guess)
• Easy to use portal/web interface
• no build-it yourself options!
• although not important, not something totally ugly 😛

 

[Modelworks]

When you start adding on things like client apps and content streaming then you are in the server area.

There are plenty of systems that can do what you want but what do you want to spend ? The no build-it yourself part increases the cost considerably.

 

[Zap]

How about something like this HP box? Not sure if hot swappable, but has 4 bays. Power consumption would be reasonable - only way to really get lower is to use an Atom which is lower performance. If all your streaming of HD video will be decoded at the device receiving the stream, then you can go for this Acer box which does have four hot swap bays and will draw less power. Both of these comes with Windows Home Server, so you can look up information on that - there are sites dedicated to WHS. It supports data redundancy, streaming, Bittorrent, remote admin and maybe even supports Mac.

As for streaming to multiple clients, that would rely a lot on the actual HDDs used.