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You might look into Thecus. I've had the N7700 for about 3 years now on the recommendation of someone who has a N5400 (and had it for a few years before I got mine) and (after I got mine) got his sister to buy a N7700PRO that he manages for her. There is no built-in DNS or VPN support, but some quick Google searches show that someone built a DNS module and it looks like there might be a VPN module too (I haven't used either so I can't speak to if or how well they work).

I did have my motherboard die 2 months out of warranty, but their replacement cost was reasonable, they took care of it fast, and they upgraded it to the new N7700PRO board for me.

When I initially set mine up I know they natively supported a Windows format, ext3, and xfs (experimental at the time). If I recall correctly it supports SMB, NFS, AFP, and iSCSI for remote connections. I set mine up using iSCSI so I could format it to a different format (which means my client systems have to talk to the server that manages it rather than directly to the Thecus itself).

3 years ago their interface was horrible, but it's seen a lot of improvements over the years and is much nicer now.

off topic, but as mentioned it's a bit of a non story("savage attack!", more like chatty observations). My research into home nas, partly based on an "ask slashdot" lead to http://www.thecus.com/ , linux based, low power, flexible, quiet, robust. I got a four slot, filled two(mirrored), then later you can put in another two by which time they'll be twice as big. It was power and noise that discouraged me from building. And maybe laziness. I like it. Not exactly cheap though.

1) Cheap tower server + your favourite unix distro + software RAID + many, many cheap 2TB drives.

2) Standalone NAS device. Everyone so far seems to recommend different makes so I'll carry on the trend and suggest Thecus. Just slot in the drives and you're ready. Install the SSH module and you also have a Linux server too.

http://www.thecus.com/ has a whole line of NAS's from SOHO to Enterprise. I believe they are linux based.

Sounds like you want a NAS unit with capabilities for a Small Office, Home Office (SOHO). Strangely, I find no mention of the Thecus line of NAS units. http://www.thecus.com/ These would be worth investigating. I personally run the thecus N5200, and two of my clients run the N5200 PRO's. The N5200 series are the only SOHO NAS units with 5 available slots and raid 5.

One of my clients has a ReadyNAS, so I've had the opportunity to compare all 3 units directly. Note that this unit wasn't a ReadyNAS+, but from what I've read, there's been no increase in speed. The largest difference is speed of file serving, although the web-based configuration is a factor as well. The Thecus blows the ReadyNAS out of the water. ReadyNAS gets about 10MB/s on a good day, and the Thecus N5200Pro units approach 30 MB/s. My older N5200 unit does about 20MB/s over gige.

Today's prices are even more convincing- The N5200PRO is available for about $750 at http://www.eaegis.com/, http://www.newegg.com/ has the ReadyNAS+ for about $900.

The N5200's have other advantages- 5 bays for instance. They also run linux, with the source for each model available at Thecus. They also have modules for special types of file serving, and you can even ssh to the box while it's running.

Here's the thing. I fell into NAS because I needed more storage space at home, to hold all my business data. And system backups. And stuff. I started with a home-built linux server running samba, but quickly realized that stock linux raid fails in the areas of raid expansion (adding more drives) and raid migration (let's run raid 5, now that I have enough cash to actually buy 3 drives). You can migrate, but you have to put the data somewhere else while you're doing it. I wanted a simple box that would do those things for me. On my N5200 unit, I have personally migrated from raid 1 to raid 5, and expanded the raid from 250GB to 320 GB drives. I now have 5 drives, will be expanding the raid with 750's soon. That would be have rather painful on a simple linux based server. I don't know about Freenas, but the hardware it supports is rather limited. Same thing for a zfs solution, not to mention that I'd have run Solaris -yuch.

If you're going to fully populate the unit from the start with the biggest drives available, raid migration and expansion won't mean much. The Thecus N5200PRO still wins as it's the only unit with 5 bays, so you get the full 4 TB's possible. That being said, the linux/freenas/zfs server options can be nice, because you'll have more control over your server, and can possibly be cheaper.

The big point here is that raid is not backup. raid is high availability, and you'll need some way to back it up. What do I do? Well, since the raid is HA, all I need is simple windows box with raid 0 or spanning and a few drives. That's if I'm doing CIFS. It'd be a linux box and nfs if that were what all my home/office boxes were. As long as the Thecus or the backup is up, I'm good.

Good luck on your search

This sounds a lot like the Thecus N2100 I just set up. The latest firmware also adds support for DLNA media sharing.

I love my Thecus NASes. I run both a N5200 and the more recent N5200pro, both have 5 hotswap SATA bays. Spin-down on idle makes for a very silent and power efficient NAS (note, n5200pro only. although this feature is advertised for the n5200 too, I've never actually got it work). Full GPL'd firmware (Linux) availabe on site, extensible through modules. Active wiki, with loads of modules (note, the n5200 modules work on the N5200pro too).

Now if only I could get ZFS to work, I'd be in heaven :)

I went through this same search a little while back. There are a lot of good solutions out there, but I ended up going with a Thecus 5200. It's got tons of room, lots of RAID options, and the user interface doesn't suck. The only complaint I have is that it's very loud. But, it sits in a room I rarely go into, so that doesn't really bother me.

I have the Thecus N4100. 4x 400GB SATA Drives, RAID5, 1.2TB Storage space. and now that seagate have the 500GB Drives, I may have to upgrade to 1.5TB RAID5! hehe.. only issues with it, and I'm not the only one who thinks so, is that the data tranfser is slow. doesn't even utilise a 100Mb NIC let alone the Gb NIC it has in it. And that it doesn't have removable & redundant PSU's