NAS for Macs

A Network-Attached-Storage device usually shares by means of SMB or AFP. It does not matter how the NAS is formatted. Any NAS should work for you. It would be better if you could find one that will support both AFP and SMB.

 

As brand said, almost any NAS will work with the Mac, but Time Machine compatibility is only assured with Time Crapsule and the new HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server device. The choice depends on your budget and your needs such as data redundancy: Generally speaking the cheaper they are, the slower they are communicating over the network - regardless of whether they advertise a gigabit interface.

 

My DNS-323 is pretty good. I have it set as a RAID 1 mirror and use it with both Mac's and a PC (Windows and Ubuntu). Performance is pretty good on a 1Gbps setup. Pretty much every NAS out there uses an embedded Linux OS, and formats the drives with an ext2 or ext3 filesystem, I'm not aware of any that will let you format with HFS+.

 

Looks like it's only 100Mbps so depends on whether that's good enough for your purposes. I hate waiting around for data transfers so the extra $$$ for the DNS-323 would be worth it for me.