NAS Recommendation Help

[Hellspamm]

Hi, I'm looking to buy a NAS. Unfortunately, the country I live in doesn't have a lot of products in that regard. Basically, I only have four options. I've listed them here with the prices in my country:

Thermaltake Muse NAS-RAID N0001LN - $601
Thecus N4100 - $927
Intel SS4000-E - $811
Promise NS4300N - $594

If you had a choice between these four at those prices, which would you recommend?
Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[cmetz]

Thecus.

But I'd build my own. You pay a lot for the privilege of having someone else package it as a product.

 

[kzrssk]

We have the Thecus at my job. It seems to work okay... But cmetz is right, just build a cheap computer with a bunch of cheap HDD controllers and have Windows Server (or Linux) do the RAID-ing. Those home/small office NAS boxes are all doing software RAID as well, anyway.

 

[bluegreenturtle]

You know I bought a thecus n5200 and while it's fast, I've never gotten it to work right and I've tried every option it has. It just sort of locks up about once a week. In hindsight I wish I hadn't bought it.

 

[JackMDS]

All the sub $1000 stand alone NAS boxes are problematic. It is a strange branch of the industry that can not get it right.

 

[kzrssk]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
All the sub $1000 stand alone NAS boxes are problematic. It is a strange branch of the industry that can not get it right.

I've heard good things about the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: kzrssk
We have the Thecus at my job. It seems to work okay... But cmetz is right, just build a cheap computer with a bunch of cheap HDD controllers and have Windows Server (or Linux) do the RAID-ing. Those home/small office NAS boxes are all doing software RAID as well, anyway.

don't buy a windows server license for a NAS...Linux is free, and way more configurable then Windows for something like this.

 

[cmetz]

NASs aren't simple to make. Look at Network Appliance. They put a *lot* of engineering effort into their software, and it shows.

The low-cost/SOHO NAS guys are mostly just running some embedded Linux distribution they integrated and a web UI a couple of their guys wrote.

World of difference between the two. Like so many things, you want the high-end product you have to pay the high-end price/you buy the low-end product you get a low-end product. SOHO NASs all suck, so you need to find one that sucks tolerably.

 

[kevnich2]

I'd definately agree with that. You won't find a NAS box for $1,000 that does performs "well". I ended up just building my own file server and putting Windows 2003 on it. It does everything I need/want is quick, reliable and has plenty of disk space.