# Home NAS horror/love stories



## Mr Fishies (Sep 21, 2007)

Looking to pick up a small <$500 2 drive RAID, 1-2 TB NAS for the home. Lots of reviews to read over but wondering if anyone here has first person hands on experience with a particular brand/model that they can share.


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## Guest (Mar 6, 2010)

Mr Fishies said:


> Looking to pick up a small <$500 2 drive RAID, 1-2 TB NAS for the home. Lots of reviews to read over but wondering if anyone here has first person hands on experience with a particular brand/model that they can share.


I have two 2 TB Elephant Raids. One attached to my WRT610 Dual Band Gigabit router as NAS and the other attached to my quad G5 Mac.

I have them in both raid 1. I'm a freak about redundant storage ever since I lost a bunch of images that took me months to scan to a faulty drive (all since recovered). I now back up important stuff weekly with Acronis to the NAS and store all my images to the other on the G5 attached unit.

I think I paid just under $400 each. I like them because they have both firewire 400/800 and USB 2.


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## tebore (Jan 3, 2010)

I've looked at and used a lot of NAS and for most part the SOHO section sucks. 

DLink and Linksys makes some good hardware but it's not cheap. 

For $500 you might as well grab an Atom m-ATX board and some terabyte drives slap it all in a nice case run some for of *nix and call it a day. 

That said I currently run the HP Home Server and couldn't be happier. Easy to use, setup, work on and integrate in to the home. I have pretty much every streaming service running on it. 4TB's of media feeding my 360, PS3 and iPhone.


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## AquaNeko (Jul 26, 2009)

I'm also looking for a RAID solution. Dlink is on sale right now at Tiger.

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/search.asp?keywords=dlink+nas

321
323

IIRC 323 has Bit Torrent support. Could be wrong as I recall reading something on it before. Never tried the Linksys stuff other then the 5 port mini 10/100 hubs which I love.


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## tebore (Jan 3, 2010)

I'd advise against those boxes as due to their software RAID controller, slow ARM processors and having a stack of many features the network transfer rate is abysmal. Some are outfitted with GigE cards but can't even push enough data to saturate 10mb connection. Barely enough for HD streaming and file transfers will be in the hours. 

At least with an Atom solution you can push a decent amount of traffic through. We're talking enough bandwidth to feed HD to about 4 360s or PS3s.


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## Mr Fishies (Sep 21, 2007)

h_s said:


> I have two 2 TB Elephant Raids. One attached to my WRT610 Dual Band Gigabit router as NAS and the other attached to my quad G5 Mac.


This really had me interested until I clued in that it only direct attaches - I'd need a new router or a dedicated PC. Too bad.



tebore said:


> For $500 you might as well grab an Atom m-ATX board and some terabyte drives slap it all in a nice case run some for of *nix and call it a day.


This option is looking more and more attractive - despite the fact I've got enough DIY projects on the go at the moment. I was hoping for something simple and standalone, but I definitely see the reward of this route, those little MSI Wind PC barebones boxes look like a good place to start.


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