Home NAS recommendations?

[William Park]

On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 11:41:12AM -0500, Giles Orr wrote:
> I'm looking for a home NAS - essentially I want a glorified hard drive
> enclosure that has a RJ-45 port on it.  Unfortunately, I think that my
> ideal unit doesn't exist, but I thought I'd ask.  I'd like it to hold
> a single hard drive: dual HDs would mean higher reliability (assuming
> RAID 0) but also higher cost, higher power consumption, probably more
> noise ... and I don't need the extra reliability.  Here's where it
> gets interesting though: I'd like it to support NFS, preferably v4.
> Of course the vast majority of these units are based on Samba, and
> support only VFAT and Windows-style permissions.  I'll live with that
> if I have to.  I have no interest at the moment in building my own out
> of an old PC.
> 
> I would have preferred to purchase a Vantec unit as they're
> recommended here and I've had good experiences with them, but their
> only NAS unit is IDE only, which strikes me as very odd.
> Recommendations would be much appreciated.

Whenever you want network, you end up dealing with OS issues, since it's
the OS which provides the network layer.  Have you considered
2-component solution:
    1. USB/eSATA harddisk -- like single/dual/quad units from
	Thermaltake ($50 for dual dock), Vantec ($60 for dual dock),
	MediaSonic ($150 for 4-bay enclosure, $250 for RAID enclosure).
    2. nettop -- like Acer Revo ($250 Linux version from
	canadacomputers.com).

Network access would be provided by whatever OS is installed on
"nettop".  This way, you chose OS and harddisk arrangement, and still
not "build your own".

-- 
William

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