1 Indeed, make sure to talk to Pixy before making a move on NAS.

2 I have a couple of Acer EasyStores.  The older (now discontinued) model rather that runs Linux than the new one that runs Windows Home Server.

The ones I have work very well, but they are no faster than a regular USB drive - about 15MB/second.  That's because they run a 500MHz Arm chip, and it just can't keep up.

The new EasyStore has a 1.6GHz Atom chip - much faster - and 2GB of RAM compared to the 128MB in mine, which will make a huge difference.  It costs more than the other models you mentioned, but that includes a 1TB drive and it holds four drives rather than two.

I had a drive fail in one of my EasyStores recently, and it didn't even hiccup.  It kept on working the entire time, and when I replaced the dead drive the online rebuild did exactly what it's supposed to.  Since that's the box that has all my anime on it, I consider it $300 very well spent.

3 I think 15MB/s is a respectable platter speed for a 5400 RPM drive. I am not sure ARM is the culprit.

4 Not so respectable for 4 drives in RAID-5, though.  And the same drives do about 60MB each when attached via SATA.

5

Pixy, the main thing that confuses me is whether it's possible, and even easy, to manage one of these things without attaching a keyboard and screen to them. I can do that with my Qube because all the management is done through web pages. (In fact, there's no where on the Qube to attach a monitor.) Do they have something equivalent going on with the Easystore?

That one you linked to looks fine for my purposes, and I'm not afraid of the price at all. Plus I like the possibility of upgrading it to 2 TB. But if it needs a keyboard and a screen, it's pretty much useless to me.

6 All the consumer NAS products I've seen are web-managed; they don't even have video cards. My ReadyNAS NV+ allows you to remotely log into its Linux OS, but it's not needed for any file-server functionality; it's mostly for people who want to add unsupported network services.

-j

7 Yep, as J says, they're all web-managed.  Some of them run Linux or BSD and allow you to log in directly as well, but all of them offer a web interface.

8 The question is how good that Web interface is. My printer has a Web interface; I've seen better ones.

9 The one on mine is basic but functional.  I think Windows Home Server has a console application that you install on your PC.  Aha.  Yes, console app, no, install - it's an RDP app.  Makes sense.

10

OK, I'm convinced. I just put in an order for that Acer Easystore, plus a 1TB drive, plus a 1000 megabit ethernet router. Total including shipping was $527.

They gave me a $40 discount on the Easystore because I bought a drive along with it, which is pleasant.

11

Probably a moot point now, since you've ordered a box that has a flavor of Windows under the covers, but just a handy data point in case it comes up in the future:  many of the NAS boxes out there (sorry, I don't recall exact makers, but I stumbled into more than one of these when I was thinking of getting one myself) have an OS that limits the length of file paths to something unreasonably small, like 128 characters, which can be a pain if you have a directory structure that's nested pretty deep.

128 may seem like a lot, but it's smaller than Win32 allows, which can be annoying if you want to use it to drag some big directory tree off your PC and it turns out there's some leaf that's just over the limit...

12

Using Linux or BSD also has issues relating to file protection since the file protection systems are entirely different.

13 Linux has EA (Extended Attributes) on files that Samba uses to support the CIFS ACLs fully, so that's not an issue. I honestly don't think there's a whole lot of a difference, except possibly in cost.

Short paths are out of the question because of the way fansub and raw files are named. If that happens, it's time to return the box for a refund.

14 Everything I've read about NAS devices indicates that speed is the key.  Unless you do your homework very carefully, you'll end up with something that's got the performance of an ancient 4800rpm laptop hard drive, if that.  One of my friends bought one of the "you supply the hard drive" cases and filled it with mongo high-speed 10k rpm drives in RAID, and the perfomance absolutely sucked.

I gather that the ones that run a micro kernel or a stripped version of linux are faster than the ones that run windows media server, but that's not always a hard rule.

15 David - yeah, a lot of the cheap appliances seem to be based on the same controller board, and are most definitely not fast.  But for shove-the-drives-in-and-forget storage, they work great.  On mine, a drive failure makes the whole front panel glow red, but it keeps right on working.

16

That's strange; a comment of mine I am sure I posted isn't here. Maybe I deleted the tab without pushing the post button.

Anyway, despite my comments about thousand megabit ethernet, I don't really care all that much if this is blazingly fast. The main attractions here are RAID and the fact that both computers will be able to access this external storage.

17 Yep, the great thing about these devices is you set them up with RAID and then just stop worrying about storage.  Well worth the investment.