Getting a NAS

why buy something designed for it thats over priced when you can do it yourself for cheaper (especially if you already have a spare computer or most of)..
FreeNAS/Openfiler and several others will do the same thing on your own hardware.
I've been using FreeNAS at work for over a year and it has worked great so far
 
by the way, fuck plugging a cable in and out of my laptop, fuck esata.
2 clients can stream movies just fine wirelessly from my DNS 323 at the same time. It has its own bittorrent server, I plug my black and white laser MFD into the thingy and I can print from anywhere too. It has a powersave mode that several fucking roommates over the years haven't been able to grasp the concept of (They keep unplugging it b/c they think it runs all the time, when in fact the HD's don't spin unless in use, drives me nuts).
I don't have a requirement to have a 4TB set of JBOD with esata transfer speeds hooked into my laptop and haven't had a need since laptop drives got into the few hunderd mb range.
Ask yourself what you want to use the thing for, how much do you want to spend, and if the data transfer rate really that important? (The gigabit speeds are awesome if you have a good infrastructure). Also, how portable does this thingy have to be (cause you don't want desktop drives banging around in a suitcase or backpack. If it needs to be portable go with laptop drives or solid state)?

4 drive version:
Newegg.com - D-Link DNS-343 Diskless System 4-Bay Network Storage Enclosure

2 drive version:
Newegg.com - D-Link DNS-325 ShareCenter 2-Bay Network Storage device with Streaming Apps

add your own drives and decide in advance if you want raid or JBOD, I recommend JBOD and copying pasting the primary once a month or so or running a script to back itself up.

I also recommend if you are going with NAS, get yourself a battery backup power supply and plug in your NAS, router, access point(s), all switches, and modem into the thing. The last thing you need is a power interruption to turn all those devices into bricks/paper weights (It happened to my parents once). Norton ghost is a good program to install on your laptop's as well once the NAS is online (it backs up your hard drive images over the wireless network automatically).
 
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I run OpenFiler at work on an old server. It works pretty fucking well.

Edit: When the fuck did HDD prices go up so much?!
 
i built my own freenas box, it's not hard and seems to be better in the long run. i took everything out of a compaq i had laying around and put it in a new case, bought 3 2tb drives, 2 gigs of ram and a raid card, installed freenas on a usb stick and setup my drives with software zfs raidz1 (basically raid5). i've had it for i think a year so far and i haven't had any major problems with it. you can isntall transmission (torrent client) on it if you want, it used to be included in version 7 but you have to manually install it now (not hard, there's tutorials on the forums for it i think anyway). but, you could pay for usenet access and install sabnzbd, couch potato and sickbeard on the nas though, which, working together, auto download tv shows and movies and organizes them, i use that setup instead of torrents

http://www.freenas.org/
 
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RC said:
True, It'd be nice to have this thing sitting off in another room connected via gigabit.

This seems good Newegg.com - D-Link DNS-343 Diskless System 4-Bay Network Storage Enclosure

Pack it will 3TB drives. (although wtf drives are the price of gold right now?)

My network is fully connected via gigabit.. anyone have experience streaming movies on a gigabit nas setup? super high resolution by chance? I just dont want to deal with stuttering..
Click to expand...

check my post above, I've got the 323 and love it. If you have any problems with super high resolution, you can always download the movie from the drive before watching, might take 5 mins though ;)
I never seem to have any problems with the speed though.
 
RC said:
True, It'd be nice to have this thing sitting off in another room connected via gigabit.

This seems good Newegg.com - D-Link DNS-343 Diskless System 4-Bay Network Storage Enclosure

Pack it will 3TB drives. (although wtf drives are the price of gold right now?)

My network is fully connected via gigabit.. anyone have experience streaming movies on a gigabit nas setup? super high resolution by chance? I just dont want to deal with stuttering..
Click to expand...

It doesn't look like that particular one supports 3TB drives.
D-Link - TechSupport FAQ
Support 3TB hard drives?

If you are looking for a NAS that'll take 3TB drives, make sure to do some researh before buying the NAS.
 
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