Please help me find the ideal NAS unit!

[ManUtdFan]

Hi all,

Recently I suffered yet another hard drive crash (a Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB USB2.0), and I have now decided that I want to purchase a NAS storage unit on which I can store backups of my important data to be accessible throughout the household (no business application whatsoever, just my own personal use). It will be used for mirroring the contents of one or more hard drives.

My requirements:

- Must be at least 300 GB
- As cheap as possible but I'll pay almost whatever it takes bar extremely expensive enterprise solutions
- Should preferably have FTP support
- Should preferably have a solid backup function or software (however, you are also most welcome to recommend third-party stuff as well!)
- Has to have a fast Ethernet interface, as I have seen many NAS units that were extremely slow in this regard...
- Should preferably have some sort of power saving mode it can enter, as it will probably be on 24/7...

Right now I am looking at units like Maxtor's Shared Storage Drive, and other units from Seagate, Iomega, Western Digital etc. I would rather not purchase an enclosure for installing an internal drive myself.

Please guys - any recommendations, ideas, personal experiences etc. are most welcome!

Thanks beforehand!

[damorg]

I'd add at least RAID 1 mirror to the list of reqs (if not RAID 5/hot spare but that's definitely more expensive) if you're not thinking in this direction already.

more disks == more $$ but as you know, hard drives die (disturbingly often). A "NAS" enclosure isn't going to be magically more robust just b/c it's got a NIC onboard.

If you want to use it as actual network storage beyond just a backup for individual machines, you'll be glad to have at least a mirror in case one of the drives goes bad.

As for backing things up, Windows ntbackup and the task scheduler can be very useful and fairly flexible for something built in to the OS (sorry, I'm assuming you're using Windows...if linux, there are plenty of options using rsync, cron, and tar/gzip). Between that option and whatever might come with a NAS drive, you can really be pretty covered.

[rjm1135]

Have you looked at the TeraStation Series from Buffalo Technologies.

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/storage.php

Rob.

[GomJabbar]

I have had 3 Maxtor 80 GB SATA hard drives fail with less than a year of service each. The first 2 drives were purchased simultaneously and failed within about a month of one another. The 3rd drive was a warranty replacement drive and failed within a year of service. I still have the 4th warranty replacement drive, but I haven't been using it since the 3rd drive failed. I don't plan on buying any more Maxtors at this time.