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Best Home Network NAS

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the everyone-wants-one dept.

jammerjam writes "My WD 120GB drive got its MBR scrambled so it no longer mounts in my W*ndoze box (I can recover the data so I know that's intact). But now that's made me realize I need to implement my data backup plan. Scouring the Internet I can't find a reliable resource for home NAS solutions. For every positive review I can find a negative that refutes it. My first choice from what I found starts at $1200...I've got $500. Anyone have a suggestion? I'm not looking for enterprise-level storage here — but I do want reliability."

5 of 802 comments (clear)

  1. OpenFiler by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Buy a couple of 500 GB SATA HDDs. You can build a box with a SATA RAID controller for probably ~$200 or so and throw OpenFiler on it. You still won't do this under $500, though. Probably under $750, though, for sure, if you're careful.

    As for the botched MBR, boot an MS-DOS or even a FreeDOS boot disk and do a fdisk /mbr. That should fix it.

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    1. Re:OpenFiler by Rogerborg · · Score: 5, Funny

      If your maiden aunt asked you what a good cheap commuter car would be, you'd recommend a Porche, wouldn't you?

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    2. Re:OpenFiler by imipak · · Score: 5, Informative
      Why not use £50 NSLU2? Dinky little ARM box with a Cisco logo on the front - it comes with a cheap as chips web UI, supports SMB and various other ways to push/pull data. And of course you can nuke the default firmware and blat it with a proper full-blown Linux installation and install software galore (Asterisk, even!) I've got my root fs on a flash stick, which makes booting pretty fast - the other USB slot has a single 500Gb drive, but you could easily make drives 2.

      You have to buy the drives as well of course, but I paid less than 70 quid for my 500Gb EISA drive. In my specific setup, the main drive could of course go bang, but I'm using it for network attached backup rather than primary storage. No reason you couldn't do it though.

  2. Re:Inexpensive backup by rubycodez · · Score: 5, Funny

    now that's just stupid, by writing hexadecimal instead of bits you can only use 1/16 the paper.

  3. Re:RAID 0 by spyrochaete · · Score: 5, Funny

    pshh, 1, 0, computers barely know the difference.