RFC: SOHO NAS solutions

[cjstaples]

Requesting comment... I'm looking into purchasing a lightweight SOHO NAS solution, and have noticed the Western Digital NetCenter, Buffalo Linkstation, Maxtor Shared Storage, etc. Leaning toward the WD at the moment but open to other options.

Anyone have real-life experience, recommendations and/or horror stories with the smaller SOHO NAS boxes?
Looking to use as a mindless-backup-only solution at present, connected to multiple-router Linksys wired/wireless network.

thanks,
=Chuck

 

[Mercutio]

WD is a four letter word.
Buffalo Terastations are essentially painless to set up. I installed one to use as a network backup device, once.

You could also look at the extremely flexible Linksys NSLU2.

My biggest complaint with SOHO NAS devices: Out of the ones I've used to date, they ALL seem to default to OFF after a power loss. Which mean I invariably get a phone call like "The network drive isn't working!" the day after a thunderstorm.

 

[cjstaples]

Decision time...

Went with the Buffalo Gigabit LinkStation 400 (HD-HG400LAN).

$299 instore at Best Buy; according to Froogle, this beats all of the online prices for this unit, strangely enough.

365gb effective storage, built-in ftp server (which isn't widely advertised in the product info - or even on the box!) Performance is decent on my pokey old Linksys routers. Just enough security to be tedious.

Setup was a bit hinky since I made the mistake of following the manual - the so-called discovery software included with the unit discovered nothing... however, the unit did appear in the local network and was configurable thru a IP address it acquired via DHCP - not the one listed in the manual (mwah ha ha). Once able to identify the unit, I had no problems with the configuration. Unit came with up-to-date firmware; their firmware updating utility (downloaded) pleasantly let me know that no update was needed. Existing user shares preconfigured worked fine, were easy to remove. There is one share that is non-removeable/non-configurable, used for help - not sure if there's anything to watch out for here.

Hiccups in use: having to reconnect to an existing share while I was in changing permissions, and some weirdness with a user account not connecting with the correct password. No checkbox for Daylight Savings Time adjustment as documented.

Otherwise, so far so good.

 

[ddrueding]

Looking for a 2TB/GbE solution.

Is the Buffalo TerraStation still the best?

 

[ddrueding]

Looking for a 2TB/GbE solution.

Is the Buffalo TerraStation still the best?

Just bought one of these. Looking good, though my network is having other issues, causing me to connect to it @100Mbit. At this rate (4MB/sec), it will take "5 days and 10 hours" to copy 1.2TB worth of stuff over to it.

 

[sechs]

I guess I'm a little late on this one, but I would have suggested an Infrant ReadyNAS. It's definitely more expensive and bit more difficult to setup, but the drives are user-replaceable, and it's, therefore, upgradeable.

I can't talk to the more recent revisions, but at the time that I bought mine over a year ago, the ReadyNAS was generally beating the TerraStation in performance tests.

 

[ddrueding]

This one is user upgradeable as well, but it runs IDE drives, so I could only test with smaller capacity drives I had laying around. It will be interesting to see whether I can add the USB drives to the same RAID array...

 

[ddrueding]

:crap:

 

[sechs]

This one is user upgradeable as well, but it runs IDE drives

I guess that must have been another reason that I didn't go with ther TerraStation.

 

[ddrueding]

Finished copying all the data to the drive. Considering it is my multimedia storage, read speeds are what is important. With the drives in RAID-5 and GbE with 7k jumbo frames, I'm getting 9MB/second; plenty for my needs.

 

[Clocker]

I just bought a 250GB SimpleTech NAS ($99 @ Newegg). Works great for my modest needs and the power management (user configurable spin-down) and built-in usb print server are perfect for me as well.

 

[ddrueding]

Vista + TeraStation = Wierdness?

I had to perform this hack to get the permissions to work at all. Now I can write and change files, but I still can't delete anything. I'm currently using FireFTP to connect and delete stuff, but it is quite odd. I don't have a non-vista machine to test with at the moment.

I'm using FTP with the same user account as on Vista, so I know the permissions are right inside the TeraStation.

Thoughts?