How can people be this damned stupid? Partly by being "too lazy to read" the comments, TFA or other sources of information, and instead relying on the ignorance they mistake for understanding.

This leads to believing and spreading utter nonsense, like "our very own National Institutes of Health funding the Chinese Red Army's Wuhan Biological Weapons Facility".

Yes, you can. I was more referring to if/when my storage requirements exceeded 5 of the largest available drives...

I'll second that - I have a QNAP TS-509 with 5 x 2Tb drives, and I have nothing but good things to say about it. Performance is excellent - transfers to/from it routinely hit about 80-90% utilisation on my Gbit LAN without any fuss. If/when the capacity of 5 drives is no longer enough for me, I strongly suspect I will either add a second one or upgrade to one of the 8-drive models.

I bought one of these too, as a cheap NAS solution for some backups and such - and I thought it was a complete pile of garbage. Functionally it was quite OK (once you jump through the necessary hoops to trick it into firing up SSH), but the thing that absolutely killed it for me was speed.

It's hard to describe how pathetically slow the transfer rates were. I tried numerous transfer methods: scp/sftp, rsync (over rsh and ssh), SMB/CIFS, NFS, FTP. The best speeds I got were FTP, and that was all of about 15 Mbit/s, with CPU pegged at 100% for entire transfer. Slowest was SFTP (presumably due to the encryption overhead), at about 4 Mbit/s. Why they bothered putting a Gigabit NIC in it I do not know. Since I wanted it mainly for backups of other machines (i.e. a couple of hundred Gb of fulls and several Gb of incrementals), it wasn't even remotely up to the task.

It's quite noisy for its size too - OK when idling, but the fan rate (and corresponding noise) jumps up whenever you do anything significant with it.

I ended up pulling the drives out and putting them in another PC (they are perfectly normal WD SATA drives), and throwing the rest away.

My advice: don't waste your money.

From my experience, the best way to earn the respect of your customers/users is to consistently deliver good service. Do all the behind-the-scenes hard yards to ensure the systems you look after are stable, reliable, and performing well (even though the users never have any visibility of this, or appreciate just how much work it takes to do). When something does go wrong - when, not if - even if it is not your fault, be professional, polite, friendly, and above all keep the user(s) informed of progress (particularly if it takes a long time to solve the problem). If the users actually know you are working hard on solving their issues, they generally appreciate it even if they don't have a clue what you are actually doing.

Remember users are not IT people, and don't understand the complexities of IT systems. Even when a problem is entirely their fault (which is unfortunately frequent), try to explain to them in clear layman's terms the correct way to do whatever they are trying to do. Even if it is a case of colossal stupidity on their part, reserve your scorn and laughter for when you relay the story to your other IT colleagues, and not when talking to the user.

If all else fails, remember that being respected by everyone isn't a job necessity, nor is it always possible. It's very unlikely you will be able to please everyone all the time. In my job, I generally have a choice between having the users hate us (because we've allowed unstable/unreliable systems through to production), or having project managers hate us (because we won't allow their shoddy rushed garbage through in order to meet their poorly planned deadlines). I opt for the latter - my job is to provide services to the end users, not to make sure project managers get their bonuses.

Australia is *not* part of the UK. It is a member of the Commonwealth - as are pretty much all of the former British colonies. It is no more a part of the UK than Canada is.

I don't have any OSX clients, sorry, or much experience with OSX in general. But the NAS itself is basically just a Linux box (it runs BusyBox), and uses ext3 filesystems and Samba/NFS. So I presume that OSX clients would work just as well (or badly, if that is the case) as they would with any similar Linux setup.

I don't run a great deal of the out-of-the-box software on mine, as I already have a couple of Linux servers for those sorts of duties. I mainly use mine for backups, music/video storage for an HTPC, and iSCSI targets for a bunch of VMware machines. But you can run pretty much whatever you want on it - there's a package management system built in which makes it easy to install a whole truckload of third-party prepackaged software (check out http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/ts509/cross/stable/), or you can just use that to install gcc and then compile anything else yourself.

I bought one of these a few months ago, and stuck 5 x 1Tb drives in it. It's certainly not the cheapest solution, but I don't regret it for a minute - it's fast (I get pretty similar speeds to those reported in the SmallNetBuilder review), quiet (can just barely hear the fan, and there is very little drive noise), reliable, easy to set up and use, and the fact that I can simply SSH into it and install/run whatever I like on there is a huge bonus. It has dual Gbit NICs and supports Samba, NFS and iSCSI, and a whole truckload of other features. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something like this.