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Or you could just get yourself a little NAS solution from Synology...

A Diskstation 1010+ coupled with a DX510 will give you up to 20TB of storage, and not be very obtrusive.

The Synology boxes also have a ton of tricks up their sleeves, and Synology continuously update their firmware, so the boxes just get better and better...for free! :)

-- Pete.

Or you could just get yourself a little NAS solution from Synology...

A Diskstation 1010+ coupled with a DX510 will give you up to 20TB of storage, and not be very obtrusive.

The Synology boxes also have a ton of tricks up their sleeves, and Synology continuously update their firmware, so the boxes just get better and better...for free! :)

-- Pete.

Or you could just get yourself a little NAS solution from Synology...

A Diskstation 1010+ coupled with a DX510 will give you up to 20TB of storage, and not be very obtrusive.

The Synology boxes also have a ton of tricks up their sleeves, and Synology continuously update their firmware, so the boxes just get better and better...for free! :)

-- Pete.

They are cheap, fast, and reliable. IMHO Synology makes the best ones. I've had a DS409+ for over a year and it provides 6TB wherever and whenever I want it.

I used to have a 4U rackmount with 8 JBOD drives + a master drive, etc, etc, etc. that I built up over two years wasting about 3K on it. It died.

I ended up replacing it all for about $1000 shipped (1.7T Raid 5). It can support 4 2T HD's and

The NAS server is the 409+ non-rackmount from Synology (same-as/replaced-by the 410):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108050&cm_re=synology-_-22-108-050-_-Product
http://www.synology.com/us/products/ds410/index.php

I spent quite some time researching the HD's to use and settled on these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152185

The newegg support was quite nice in helping m get drives from different batches (overkill, but nice).


It has worked fantastic. Supports timemachine and itunes naively, is a media server (integrates with my segate freeagent theater+ and PS3 seamlessly), the download manager rocks, and all our photo's are served up to the extended family (yea dyndns integration). Also integrates with UPS, external drives, and broadcasts the UPS issue to all my machines on the network. support for everything (and I mean everything.)

the admin interface this thing comes with is fantastic (linux on it with busybox and the ability to add your own packages):
http://www.synology.com/us/products/features/index.php

little box seriously rocks.

I used to have a 4U rackmount with 8 JBOD drives + a master drive, etc, etc, etc. that I built up over two years wasting about 3K on it. It died.

I ended up replacing it all for about $1000 shipped (1.7T Raid 5). It can support 4 2T HD's and

The NAS server is the 409+ non-rackmount from Synology (same-as/replaced-by the 410):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108050&cm_re=synology-_-22-108-050-_-Product
http://www.synology.com/us/products/ds410/index.php

I spent quite some time researching the HD's to use and settled on these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152185

The newegg support was quite nice in helping m get drives from different batches (overkill, but nice).


It has worked fantastic. Supports timemachine and itunes naively, is a media server (integrates with my segate freeagent theater+ and PS3 seamlessly), the download manager rocks, and all our photo's are served up to the extended family (yea dyndns integration). Also integrates with UPS, external drives, and broadcasts the UPS issue to all my machines on the network. support for everything (and I mean everything.)

the admin interface this thing comes with is fantastic (linux on it with busybox and the ability to add your own packages):
http://www.synology.com/us/products/features/index.php

little box seriously rocks.

I use these:
http://www.synology.com/us/index.php

Depends on how far you want to scale.

Have you checked the Synology NAS boxes? http://www.synology.com/us/index.php

One of them may be suitable, if you're just planning on having a Linux file server with some extras, and don't need to install your own *nix or arcane packages. We have a DS-209 with two 500GB disks in RAID1. On our 100Mbit LAN at home, it typically gets read/write speeds of 6-8MBps, which is about 40-50% of the theoretical bandwidth. It has an UPS interface for safe shutdown when our UPS is nearly drained.

You can install some add-on packages, and enable several services in addition to just file serving on most Synology NAS units, such as web server, photo server, download/torrent redirection, scheduled backup to external drive, and media server functions. You can also enable ssh (and telnet & ftp) and log in to do additional configuration, although the web-based administration interface is quite OK. Of course, it's advisable to limit outside access to services via your firewall. We also prevent the NAS from calling home...

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Synology, except as a mostly satisfied customer.

http://www.synology.com/us/products/DS109+/spec.php Check out the specs on this product. It takes up to a 2 tb sata hd, has mail, web, and runs php. It uses only 21w during use. I purchased the 409+ for its raid5 capability.

A number of NASes can download files from web, like this one

I have one. Works great*. The CPU is a little slow though, so the UI starts to really slow down on updates once 5+ torrents are running. Ten is the hard cap on the 108 model. Uses ~15 watts with an old sata HD and torrents thrashing the drive.

* As a torrent/etc its great. It has one HUGE flaw though, it is horribly slow at transfers. It may have a gigabit nic, but the CPU can only push about 8MByte/sec what it's pushing large files. Use lots of little ones (eclipse folder, for example?)and it drops to 2, even 1.5MByte/sec...

It's fine to stream movies and DL, but it's too slow to do disk imaging or even lots of seeking (jump back and forth) on an HD clip.

A number of NASes can download files from web, like this one

Synology has a fair amount of good data on their website, and I've found the interface to be nice, though I'm a lite user. They're one of the relatively few companies that I've read about that has consistently good reviews. Their items are pricey, however.

Except that I'd rather spend the money all at once and actually have something, like a nice NAS sollution with 2 raid disks in it. Could be as simple as this. Way faster, failing disks covered by raid.

Only advantage I'd see for Amazon is that it's offsite, so you get to keep your data in case your house burns down. Yay!

Any of the Synology products can do this. See
http://www.synology.com/enu/solutions/bkp_remote.php

I heard a lot of good from friends of mine about the Synology Cube Station CS407, and that's the one I have on order now. I like the fact it's expandable, I'm e.g. planning to run a Squeezebox server on it. It has good support, and a large user community.

Others I heard about: Intel SS4200-E (Helena Island). It exists in two versions, one with an embedded OS on a flash and one without any soft. The one with software included has not that much possibilities and is not expandable, it's in the category "it just works." For the other version, I heard installing Linux or Windows Home Server on it is a PITA...

The ReadyNAS by Infrant (recently bought by Netgear) also gets good comments.

Well, from my own experience, I would recommend one of the Synology NAS systems. I'm using a DS207+ myself, and while it's probably not the cheapest option, the device is well build, running linux, there is a ssh package available from the manufacturer and it comes with preinstalled mysql+php support. It also supports smb+afp, iTunes Sharing and offers a bunch of other services...
The only downside at the moment is that the UDMA service is not compatible with my PS3, so no direct streaming right now.

Well, from my own experience, I would recommend one of the Synology NAS systems. I'm using a DS207+ myself, and while it's probably not the cheapest option, the device is well build, running linux, there is a ssh package available from the manufacturer and it comes with preinstalled mysql+php support. It also supports smb+afp, iTunes Sharing and offers a bunch of other services...
The only downside at the moment is that the UDMA service is not compatible with my PS3, so no direct streaming right now.

I've got a Synology CS407 . I like setting up a linux server just as much as the next guy, but I find that having reliable storage and a nice server to twiddle with are different things. I've put in 4 SATA2 drives of 500Gb each, and rolled RAID5 on them. Never looked back :)

I have a CS407 from Synology, and it really is very good and very flexible with handy features including an iTunes server, printer sharing, website hosting, etc and it will run torrents as well, so you don't need to leave your PC on overnight, just the NAS box.

It does look like it's a bit out of your range though by the time you buy disks, but they proide smaller NAS boxes with the same software - I wanted RAID-5 though, so had to pay for the larger model that could take 4 disks. I haven't had any problem with it, and I strongly recommend you take a look if you're in the market for NAS boxes for the home.

Cheers,

-- Pete.

I have a CS407 from Synology, and it really is very good and very flexible with handy features including an iTunes server, printer sharing, website hosting, etc and it will run torrents as well, so you don't need to leave your PC on overnight, just the NAS box.

It does look like it's a bit out of your range though by the time you buy disks, but they proide smaller NAS boxes with the same software - I wanted RAID-5 though, so had to pay for the larger model that could take 4 disks. I haven't had any problem with it, and I strongly recommend you take a look if you're in the market for NAS boxes for the home.

Cheers,

-- Pete.

I am using the Synology CS407e but even their lowend DS-106j model has a built in client. I believe these devices run some form of Debian too. Works great sharing stuff over SMB to XBMC :)

After screwing around using a mixture of linux/freebsd with numerous software and hardware raid drive and so long, having spend a lot of time that I could have use to other thing and also having a hardware failure that was never suppose to happen (You know the kind) and recovering from backup most of my stuff.

The goal of all this was to have a lot of storage for my house on the network for my PC, mac and Roku

I decided to try a different way and bought a http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS106j/synolo gy 106e (You can get it naked, so you get your own drives), added a SATA 500Gig internal and a external 500Gig usb. Backup are automatic once a week (Good for me) and in case of hardware issue I can mount on any PC. You can also do network backup across unit and I may do that later to a remote site. They also have now raid box. It's also 1000BT but I have not seen much speed improvement for what I do at lease. They is a bunch of software running, ftp, www, mysql, php, photo management and media server (itune and UPNP)

This has been working great for me, there was some privilege issue between the mac and the pc some time but I don't mind too much. It's running linux inside and you can even get in with some special tools(Not recommended by the manufacturer)

I did this over a year ago and have not spend more then a few hours on it, mostly software upgrade and some minor issue, the termo static fan is starting to make some noise, but it's in the garage so I don't mind :-)