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Looking for a barebones NAS setup

5

50thVert

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 20, 2005
183
0
St. Louis, MO
Hey every1,
Im in the market for a Network Attached Storage (NAS) unit. It seems that this prebuilt 1TB system is probably one of the most cost effective ones at $770. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822155306

I'd still like to see if i couldnt beat that price though. I can get 4x250GB drives from Newegg for $380. Are there any enclosures under $400? It needs to have 4 HDD bays and gigabit LAN. I would also love if it had some USB 2.0 ports for expansion later on. Does anyone know of a good barebones unit that i could throw my own harddrives into?
Thanks
-Zach
 
Thanks for the reply CanadaRAM. This application will be in my household, for my parents to reliably backup their home stuff, as well as an off-site, reliable, internet accessible backup for their dental practice. Then with whatever space is left, it will become a ethernet accessible media server for the Mac Mini we have hooked up to our HDTV. Looks like just a generic Buffalo setup will be good enough for me.

Thanks,
-Zach
 
Low cost, Serial ATA, redundancy, 4 drives, Removeable cartridges and Gigabyte ethernet

Choose any two only, 3 at the most.

My experience with Buffalo is that you better have a Windows machine on hand for configuration. They are not particularly Mac friendly (this is true of most brands of NAS)
 
CanadaRAM said:
Low cost, Serial ATA, redundancy, 4 drives, Removeable cartridges and Gigabyte ethernet

Choose any two only, 3 at the most.

My experience with Buffalo is that you better have a Windows machine on hand for configuration. They are not particularly Mac friendly (this is true of most brands of NAS)
Click to expand...

Unfortnately the rest of my family is switching to Mac once the Intels come available (their dental office software is Windows only and they dont wanna go through the slow emulator), so we got plenty of XP machines in the house.

If i had to choose two, id pick redundancy and low cost. If i could add a third in there it would be 4 drives. The fourth would be gigabit ethernet.

Id prefer all the storage to be in one four drive enclosure, but I can deal with having multiple, small NASs on the network if it'll be faster/cheaper. I can just software RAID them in OS X cant i? The gigabit is probably the least important because i will be the only one accessing it via ethernet and not 802.11g.

-Zach
 
I too have been looking for a good barebones NAS, but I have no desire to spend 1k for the enclosure :(. I am thinking of just building a small low powered server to perform this function, or just slap something together from all my left over hardware.

Kimo
 
Remember, RAID only protects you from drive failure. It doesn't protect you if you back up bad data over a previously good data set because there is no history or rollback.

The backup software that will manage your *unattended, scheduled* backups is at least as important as the backup device

Here's what I set up for one client:
Spare PowerMac
Firmtek SATA card and dual-bay SATA enclosure (hot swappable)
Retrospect
2 (or more) Seagate 400 Gb SATA drives in hotswap trays

The Retrospect scripts are set up to alternately write to different drive caddies on a daily rota. Last night's backup is popped out of the dock and carried off-site, so if the place burns down, they lose only 24 hours of business data tops. If you wanted faster turnover, you could do a 3 or 4 drive rotation, backing up 2 x per day, with 1 or 2 offsite drives.
 
kbonnel said:
I too have been looking for a good barebones NAS, but I have no desire to spend 1k for the enclosure :(. I am thinking of just building a small low powered server to perform this function, or just slap something together from all my left over hardware.

Kimo
Click to expand...

Yeah after my parents upgrade to macs in the next year, it almost seems like it would be more cost effective for me to take the one of the two Athlon XP systems, strip it down to barebones, add in 4 drives and a SATA RAID PCI card, throw it on the network, and call it a day.

But a NAS is so much more elegant, smaller, and more to-the-point. That and i wouldnt have to deal with Linux or XP! :p

-Zach
 
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