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Why even spend that much? Just a NAS that does AFP.
http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASDuo/RND2110.aspx

Or even a USB drive and an Airport Base station on the network.

Or even just a ethernet to USB converter to a USB drive.
http://www.simpletech.com/products/storage/simplenet/simplenet.php

Yahoo News : " On one end of the power-brick-shaped device are two USB connections, and on the other end sits a single 10/100 Ethernet port. Attach that side of the device to your network and you can hotswap any number of USB-based storage devices (be they hard drives or flash-based) to the two connectors on the other side." Apparently the product has an unfortunate conflict with an existing web hosting service. Product page here.

SO has anyone actually USED Vista? What am I doing right/wrong that I have NOTHING to complain about it?

You are using it in a 100% Windows walled garden. I bought by wife (i know, geek, wife, wtf?) a new laptop with Vista for her schoolwork. I had just a couple simple tasks to perform to finish up the setup.

1 connect to the backup NAS and copy her files.
http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/
2 Connect to our networked printers.
http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=21&FamID=42&ProdID=223

The first task took over 2 hours and a massive Google search. The second task took a little over an hour to connect the first printer. The second went a lot faster.

Vista by default has changed the security level (a feature) but it isn't well docummented, so when connecting to a Simple Share NAS box I couldn't log in. It requires a registry tweak to back down the security level to enable logging in and transferring files.
http://blogs.msdn.com/chkdsk/archive/2006/03/10/548787.aspx
http://www.builderau.com.au/blogs/codemonkeybusiness/viewblogpost.htm?p=339270746

The second was a 5 minute task in Ubuntu for a complete noob. I used a stand alone printserver hanging on the back of my inkjet and laserjet printers to provide CUPS networking for my printers. In Ubuntu, it was easy to put in the IP address \\192.168.1.102\lp1 and pick a printer. It was intuitive to pick network printing and put in the printer address. In Windows it took quite a while to figure out how to do internet printing without a directory services server.

It was far from easy for a Vista noob.

Here is the info.

http://www.simpletech.com/support/guides/user-guides/61600-00072-001.pdf

It's under disk pool management. Support for mirrored and striped is listed.

It is low power, inexpensive, takes little shelf space and works well for me.
Use whatever size external drives you like.

What is the single best product I can buy and configure at my home office to hold a "safety copy" of my data? Should I simply RAID a few drives in an old *NIX box? Is there a pre-configured-in-a-shiny-box product worth the price? Educate me, please educate me. I still hear the clicking of a crashed MacBook HD, even as I type this.

Disclaimer, I have a couple on my shelf, but no other affilliation. The box does nice raid with a couple external USB drives. Simple and works well. Uses much less power than a typical PC fileserver.

http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/

Load an older version of the firmware to Raid the external drives. Raid and encryption has been removed in the new versions of firmware.

With the right program, any FW device plugged into your system can suck out the plaintext RAM contents (including your keys), install and run rootkits without even touching the disk, etc.

I guess I needed to be more specific than this statememt.
I prefer encrypted external storage which uses a non-standard filesystem.

To be more specific, hardware based encrypted NAS appliance, not a general purpose PC.
Not only is it lacking a firewire port, but has no place to install one.
http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/

The old version of firmware supports drive encryption. The newer version dropped encryption and has a fancy drop and sort media directory instead.

Several forums have discussed removing the internal drive to read them on a Linux PC, but was unable to mount the filesystem.

The only ports on this box is a power jack, USB ports, and an ethernet connection.

Cool. What do you use? What does it run on (hardware/os)? Like it? Used it long? Any other helpful hints?

I use a Simple Share by Simple Tech. They have several flavors from 160, 250, & 400 Gig. If you look online you can find info on changing the HD to something you like. It can also use external USB drives in addition to the internal one.

Cavit.. Watch the firmware version. They are flashable, but the newer versions of firmware have dropped the partitioning and encrypted partition features. Check online for the features you want and flash the drive to the version you wish. Remember, the new versions have dropped the encrypted partition support.

Another note. Avoid the 160 Gig model. It has a 1 year warranty while the others have a 3 year warranty. If it is not in a secure location, they have a place for a laptop lock.

I love the partition that becomes a brick if the unit is "borrowed". I keep my banking, tax, password lists and other sensitive information there. Someone may take the drive, but not the personal info.

http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/

Want a Windows Home Server? Load a copy of Linux/*BSD and Samba on to a spare PC.

Want to save some power, desk space, and money on hardware?

http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/

Here is a Linux package without the bulk and power requirements of a PC. The wall wart to power it is rated at 36 Watts max. It provides disk encryption, user based or share based access control, SMB and nfs. With the addition of external USB drives it provides RAID mirroring and striping. If you don't use RAID, it can simply expand using external USB drives. If you are not using both USB ports for drives, it can be used as a USB printserver.

For the ultimate geek, the firmware is hackable. You can add telenet for example. No warranty for making a brick however.

Units other than the 160 Gig model have a 3 year warranty. (I've used it. I mis-configured the software by enabling user based rights and share password based rights (a no-no that is not documented) and they recovered it under warranty.

Drive spin-down works except under version 1.07 of the firmware where drive health monitoring keeps it awake.

Easy. You can get solid-state 2.5" disc drives. http://www.simpletech.com/oem/ideflashdrive/index. php for one. Remove old hard drive, install new one. Install OS of choice. DISABLE VIRTUAL MEMORY. Done.

Of course, if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

http://www.simpletech.com/oem/zeus/index.php

256GB, SATA, 60MB/Sec, 7 year warrantee.

this is way old news, and while it was amusing to see this "article" on digg.com, it's just plain sad to see it here.

Apparently I'm an idiot. Here's a working link.
http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/

Recently, a friend asked me to look for a cheap NAS solution. One of his (many) requirements was native interoperability with MacOS 9. Most NAS solutions integrate well in an environment with modern OS versions, but don't play nice with older SMB or AFP versions.
  I looked for weeks, until I found this goodie from Lacie (a french company known for its MAC products): http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=1059 4

compatibility:
Windows® 98SE*; Windows® 2000*; Windows® Me*; Windows® XP (SP1 & SP2); Mac® OS 9*/X, Linux 2.4 & higher*
* Only on the Ethernet network

It has everything he wished for, it's cheap and easy to use.

If compatibility isn't an issue, just google around for some reviews. If I remember correctly, most of the reviewers were quite impressed with the solutions from SimpleTech: http://www.simpletech.com/commercial/simpleshare/i ndex.php

Here's the home page of the 60GB (not 80GB) one. Click Here

I prefer my SimpleTech Bonzai (not the Xpress). Why? Future expandibility. As SD cards grown in capacity, I can upgrade as need be. I don't have to worry about out growing a fixed capacity flash drive. The drawback is that the SD card is more expensive.

I have an SD-based keychain drive (SimpleTech Bonzai) and it does not have any DRM issues. I can copy any stuff that I want to the thing. I think the "Secure" part is optional.

You need to look up what Secure Digital cards really are before assuming that they're automatically a DRM thing. Secure Digital is a card format that has the ability of doing DRM, but not required. It's a follow on to the MMC cards. Happens to be the same card as the Palm units. See SanDisk for more info.

I have Bonzai USB Mini-Drive that uses SD cards and I am not restricted in what I can cart on it. Works great as a bit-bucket to carry stuff around and I'm not stuck at a fixed capacity like the more popular Disk-On-Key Flash memory USB things.

Also, don't forget that this is a reference design. If an OEM wants to built in CF or Bluetooth, there is nothing stopping them except for some engineering.

My titanium powerbook beats the pants off that Best Buy thing.

My Tibook is %20 thinner, %18 lighter (1 lbs. lighter... what the heck are they doing with all that weight? Cooling systems?), not to mention my machine is titanium, superior to magnesium.

Also my Tibook has a powered, 6pin firewire port where the Best Buy model has unpowered 4 pin firewire (which means carrying a powerbrick for your firewire devices and cable adaptors).

Im guessing the battery life of my 'book is substantially better too.

Then comes aesthetics...overall the Tibook is clearly a sexier machine, but specifically compare the back of the Titanium Powerbook to the back of this machine.

The article also doesnt mention what kind of video chip is driving the Best Buy laptop. I wouldnt be surprised if it were inferior.

What!? No Digital Video Out? Where's the DVI port? That's the whole reason I waited to buy the 2002 Titanium Powerbook!

I'm really glad Best Buy wasted all that space to cram in a paralell port! Wow, now that's a selling point!

And last and most important...the Best Buy machine doesn't run MacOS X Jaguar 10.2

And to improve on that idea, follow Google's example, and replace the disk drive with a flash disk!

i have been very pleased with my sandisk flashdrives. basically they are IDE-interface drives with flash memory instead of spinning platters. 0 ms seek time is nice, so is -silent- and -very very low power- storage. not to mention if you don't have to treat it like an egg.

i've used both the flashdrive from sandisk, and the IDE flash drives from simpletech.

the sandisk flashdrives have sizes from very small (4 MB) to big enough for your MP3s (2 GB). of course they get expensive at the high end :) best things about them are (1) can get them semi-cheap from ebay and (2) standard IDE interface.

i have been very pleased with my sandisk flashdrives. basically they are IDE-interface drives with flash memory instead of spinning platters. 0 ms seek time is nice, so is -silent- and -very very low power- storage. not to mention if you don't have to treat it like an egg.

i've used both the flashdrive from sandisk, and the IDE flash drives from simpletech.

the sandisk flashdrives have sizes from very small (4 MB) to big enough for your MP3s (2 GB). of course they get expensive at the high end :) best things about them are (1) can get them semi-cheap from ebay and (2) standard IDE interface.

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.

--

As I understand the situation right now, the Rio will only accept Flash cards that are of the Smartmedia variety (recognizable by the gold plate in the center and a small notch at the top right.) Sandisk's 48MB card is CompactFlash not Smartmedia. I think 16MB is the largest available card that will work in the Rio at the moment, although Samsung and Simple Technologies have both announced 32MB versions that will be released in the next month or two. Diamond has also confirmed that the Rio will support cards as large as 64 Meg and perhaps even higher. (There are no prototypes as of yet to test them on.) Anyways, the future looks bright. My Rio sounds great, and new products like the Yepp are set to make the movement explode! Nice work Diamond!