Budget NAS Devices - A distant dream? 2
Submitted
by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes "I recently decided to man up and sort out my mid to long-term storage situation. Having a strict budget of under £200 didn't seem too bad, especially with the low price of hard drives these days. £120 bought me 2 x 2TB Samsung drives.
But how to use them? I like many others am working solely from a laptop these days so a network accessible consumer NAS was needed (with DNLA for streaming to the PS3 also a requirement). Only problem — suitable units from Thecus, Netgear et al seem to cost a couple of hundred themselves. I picked up a budget £50 second-hand enclosure and it's awful — terribly designed software which gives actually no faith in the underlying RAID1 array.
The only alternative appears to be to roll my own — but for £80 how do I achieve this without resorting to an old, load & power-hungry box? Is anyone rolling their own ARM based unit or is Atom the way to go once again? Also, underneath what is everyone using? A flavour of server 'NIX, FreeNAS, unRAID?"
But how to use them? I like many others am working solely from a laptop these days so a network accessible consumer NAS was needed (with DNLA for streaming to the PS3 also a requirement). Only problem — suitable units from Thecus, Netgear et al seem to cost a couple of hundred themselves. I picked up a budget £50 second-hand enclosure and it's awful — terribly designed software which gives actually no faith in the underlying RAID1 array.
The only alternative appears to be to roll my own — but for £80 how do I achieve this without resorting to an old, load & power-hungry box? Is anyone rolling their own ARM based unit or is Atom the way to go once again? Also, underneath what is everyone using? A flavour of server 'NIX, FreeNAS, unRAID?"
