Best Network Drive for home users?

[hagi]

Hi, a friend of mine wants to set up a shared hard drive at home for backup and centrally storing files/photos. They have a couple of MacBooks, iPhones, iPads and an iMac. They're non technical so they need an easy to use solution, with raid redundancy for ease of mind, capacity I'm looking at 2 to 4 GB.

I've been looking at these drives, Synology DiskStation, Western Digital My Book Live, IOMEGA Home Media Network Hard Drive and Seagate BlackArmor NAS 110.

Any recommendations/suggestions? Thanks.

 

[itsmrjon]

Any recommendations/suggestions? Thanks.

If you have an old computer lying around then my recommendation is simply to build a FreeNAS system (http://www.freenas.org/). In terms of price it will be the cheapest as well as most feature filled (given that you have a PC you can convert). It will probably be the steepest learning curve in terms of setting it up properly. But I'm extremely happy with mine (32 TB and counting!)

However, if you're interested in ease of use with not a great concern for speed, the LaCie systems are very good. I use a LaCie 5big Network 2 at work, and my sister uses a LaCie Network Space 2 at home. They have minimal setup and maintanence.

The Synology has been shown to be one of the fastest at a decent price point for a preconfigured system. Reviews are great on it, and it has a nice plugin system.

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Anyway, back onto the FreeNAS. I have an LACP compatible switch with dual NICs on my FreeNAS and Mac, it will outperform 99% of premade systems. Heres a quick view of me moving some video files from my Mac to my NAS

 

[OCICILIONI]

network storage solution

I have had a number of network drives and have come to like best Other World Computing's Mercury Elite Raid Drives. They are very cost effective and are designed for MAC people. The Mercury Elite can connect via Fire Wire or esata. They send all the cables with the drives as well. I have had one in my business for a year and experienced no problems with it whatsoever.