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Recommendation for NAS with Gigabit Ethernet and minimum 1TB

maestrokev

maestrokev

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 23, 2007
875
8
Canada
Anyone have recommendations on brands, preferably that can work with any hard drive. I was interested in Buffalo LinkStation but it looks like if a RAID drive fails you have to buy their Buffalo HD's.

I also use the new AEBS so assume a NAS with Gigabit Ethernet should be noticeably faster than using the USB2 port on the AEBS?
 
not a brand recommendation, but i built my own rather than buying a prebuilt NAS. its pretty easy and you can put exactly what you want in it. i use FreeNAS as my operating system with 4 x 500GB seagate drives in RAID-5 which gives me about 1.2TB of space. over wired gigabit ethernet it is faster than FW400 for transfer speeds. it usually ranges from 30 to 40 MB per second.
 
i could have done it for half the price i did it for, but i wanted middle of the road new parts instead of lowend used ones.

-Asus M2NPB-VM motherboard (built-in video, and gigabit LAN)
-AMD Sempron 64 3000+ processor (cheapest socket AM2 processor i could find on newegg)
-Corsair 512MB DDR2 RAM
-Cooler Master Centurion 5 case (cheapest relatively decent looking case with a 120mm back fan and an 80mm fan over the drive cage)
-Enermax Noisetaker EG45P 430w power supply
-4 x 500GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA drives
 
The only RAIDing NAS I can really recommend on the basis of performance is the Thecus N5200. I have the 4-port gigabit switch versions.

http://www.thecus.com/products_over.php?cid=1&pid=32

Just bolt your own drives to the caddies and stick them in. I'm running with 4x 750Gb drives on one and 4 x 500 on another, no operational issues. Feels a bit cheaply made to be honest (especially the caddies) but works.

It's fast - nearly as fast as buying a cheap PC, sticking a decent gigabit card on it and installing Linux or something - and quite convenient. Certainly a lot more convenient than building your own PC, and there are only a couple of faster NAS's on the market. The ReadyNAS NV+ is good too and is broadly in the same performance bracket (although in most cases beaten out by the N5200) but I chose to settle with the N5200 as a better fit for my own use.

It's more hands-off to set up and run than a PC or Mac for sure, and this combined with the performance requirement to match a PC-hosted server is the reason to get these. The downside is that they're not that much less than buying a low-cost PC. But I have servers, and the NAS's fulfil a slightly different - and I'd say a handier - storage requirement.
 
I also recommend the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+. I bought the chassis when it came out and have put 4 disks into it -- works great.

Since NetGear bought them it doesn't look like you can do that now and have to buy it with at least a couple of disks (which is a more expensive way to do it).

On my recommendation my brother just bought one last week and his has a NetGear badge over the Infrant badge on the front...
 
I have (2) LaCie GB NAS Rack Mounts. They are 2 TB each. I like them except when they sit right next to you. Then the fans are too noisy. I would buy them again, except I am moving to an XServe Raid.
 
BTW, you can go to smallnetbuilder.com for NAS performance charts. Very informative and quite relevant to real-life experiences. And as you can see not all "Gigabit Ethernet" NAS's live up to their billing - in fact, few do.
 
What is the noise level like on the Infrant ReadyNAS devices?

Any clue what the Netgear buyout will mean? I have never had a good experience with anything from Netgear.
 
Sesshi said:
BTW, you can go to smallnetbuilder.com for NAS performance charts. Very informative and quite relevant to real-life experiences. And as you can see not all "Gigabit Ethernet" NAS's live up to their billing - in fact, few do.
Click to expand...

Wow, didn't know that, thanks.
 
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