Home NAS advice

I'm really wanting to setup a home NAS for doing backups and looking for some advice. I'm not looking to spend a lot and I want something small, quiet and efficient.

I'm debating between a home NAS box or building a small computer and using that. Probably only run a 2disk RAID 1 but I have too look at my data sizes.

The reviews for the small home NAS boxes seem to be bi-polar. One person says their great the next says it's a complete fail...so I think maybe they have reliability issues in the lower end price range? I think a small computer might be something that's more flexible but I don't know if I can build anything with such a small footprint and is cool/quiet as a home NAS. Maybe a LLano system but I don't know if they'd have RAID support.

Any advice would be great!

How many greens are we talking about?

I'd strongly recommend going DIY builds instead of NAS.

Personally, I'd go with a cheap build and run whs2011. I'd go decent dual-core (my e7500 is very adequate).

My objectives were slightly different than your's...in addition to backing up all the clients I wanted centralized storage and servage (yeah...not a word...but you know what i mean) of all our movies and music.

Compared to a NAS, whs2011 adds a ton of flexibility and very cool things you can do. It allows expanding storage (as/when the need or desire arises) beyond the 2-4 drives NAS' offer.

It used to be a bit more set up effort than a pre-built NAS but whs2011 helped A LOT in that area (compared to whs v1). One caveat, though...once you want to go beyond a couple drives you'll want to buy Stablebit's Drivepool software ($20 and SOOOO worth it!).

Anyway...that's 1 suggestion. Food for thought, anyway.

I'd rather go ESXi with OpenIndiana or standalone OpenIndiana.

I just love ZFS too much, methinks.

I might have to play around a bit..I have a modest tower that's an athlon X2 45w that I have used kinda as a HTPC kinda as a gaming machine...I could re-purpose it but then I'd loose any machine capable of playing anything halfway new on the PC like SC2.

For those of you using your NAS for backup's as well what software are you guys using? I have a Mac/PC mixed environment.

You could definitely re-purpose that box if you wanted to (or maybe, short term, set up dual boot and load whs or any other o/s and give them a try).

WHS takes care of all the client backups so no additional software. We don't have any macs in our household so don't know that side.

txus.palacios said:

I'd rather go ESXi with OpenIndiana or standalone OpenIndiana.

I just love ZFS too much, methinks.

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That's why I had to go M$haft, good for slow-ish people like me. I can't understand half of what you posted

funsoul said:

That's why I had to go M$haft, good for slow-ish people like me. I can't understand half of what you posted

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Ooooh WHS is windows home server....if I go windows I'd probably go full on server I have a license. I was thinking off the top of my head though of being able to mount an NFS share since it's so compatible with backup software...atleast in the enterprise world it is.