Buffalo NAS Device

[ozbear]

Saw one at Harvey Norman yesterday. Gigabit Ethernet attached network hard drive(s). 4x250 GB drives which can be configured as either 4 separate drives, 2x500 GB mirrored again the other 2x 250 GB, 1 TB RAID0 stipe set, or 750 GB RAID5, so all the optios seem to be there.

Price was around $1299 AUD. Most everything else I hae seen, at least in the shops are USB sttached which does not fit my needs. I want a LAN connected device.

Thoughts? Opinions? Buy it?

Oz

[vbap]

This link has some nifty performance charts comparing a whole bunch of NAS devices

[ozbear]

Thanks for the charts. Overall transfer speed is not my primary conern as long it is fast enough to meet my needs which are being able to serve one MCE box for playback and also to be able to backup other PC's in a reasonable amount of time, where reasonable is defined as 20->30 GB overnight.

Oz

[AshW]

I've found these devices to be sensational.

The N4100 works out about the same price as you are looking at. I have one these and the smaller N2100 so let me know if you need some info.

http://www.thecus.com/products_index...bcdb1083312956

[ozbear]

Ash,

Thanks for the link. I am bit uncertain about aspects of this device however. It is advertised as terabyte-level, but no upper bound capacity is really mentioned unless I am supposed to infer that since it has four bays, each with a capacity of 400GB that the maximum capacity of one box is 1.6 TB?

Also, the prices I have found via ShopBot seem to be in the $700 AUD range. I assume that this is just for the box alone, e.g., the drive bays are unpopulated....yes? So the total price including hard drives would be...?

Thanks for your help.

Oz

[AshW]

I don't know of an upper limit either, I think it just depends on the size of the drives and what Raid level you use. The specs say each drive can cater up "80/120...../500Gb and above"

Your ~$700 price is about right for the box only, 4 * 250Gb drives can be had for ~$450 which is ~$1150.

[ozbear]

Another thought I had was to acquire a USB<-->Ethernet converter (D-Link makes such a beast) thereby allowing me to use much chaper USB-connected external hard drive storage for sharing on the network as well as using some of the devies I already own.

I fear performance would suffer though.

Anyone have experience with such a setup?

Oz

[bigbob]

Oz,

Have you checked out MS's new Home Server software ?

I was about to get a NAS device and read about Home Server and it has me somewhat interested i.e. build a basic spec PC with 4-6 SATA HD's and use Home Server to run it.

Bob

[ozbear]

bigbob,
I've been reading posts about it in but haven't investigated it. I would prefer to not run yet-another-Windows-box as I already have more than I need to look after at the moment, although after I do look into it there might be potentialities of scaling down several other machines onto it. I need to do some pre research.

Bascially, all I really want is a toaster with a lot of hard drive space in it.

Oz

[philzgr8]

As said elsewhere Oz, I've also tackled this issue recently too but in the end I came up with what might prove to be a temporary solution. It was my intention to build a FreeNAS box but I just didn't have time for the learning curve. My next choice was to build a Windows 2000 server since I have licenses for it. In the end Windows 2000 gave me too many compatibility issues which I had completely forgotten about and couldn't be bothered troubleshooting so I just finished up building a simple headless Windows XP box to share files. The box is very quiet and does the job reasonably well but I'm not sure it won't eventually get overwritten with FreeNAS. I just don't like the overhead of Windows for such a simple function but it was quick and easy to set up and I didn't have much time. For now it will have to do.