Looking for NAS solution....

[lianregnif]

First of all I apologize for the newbie questions. For the past 2 days I have been looking at some NAS solutions but haven't seen anything that caught my eye.

I have a budget of ~400 dollars. It must have redundancy and must be greater than 250gigs. I must also access the files on the drive from anywhere I have an internet connection. It is used for a small office where 5 people can access it. 2 of the computers have vista installed.

I looked into the buffalo linkstation pro duo. It seems to fit the bill, but not many reviews have been written on it. Also buffalo seems to have a mediocre support for vista.

If you guys have any suggestions or recommendations please help.

[scoob8000]

I'm running a Buffalo Linkstation Live and it's great.

I also had a QNAP TS-101 which was terrific because of it's multipurpose functionality.

The only way to get redundancy with those two options however are adding an external disc via USB2 (Buffalo) or ESATA (Qnap).

Maybe a 3rd option would be to build a budget system, find hard drives and a raid controller of your choice and install FreeNAS?

[th3 godfather]

with the qnap, can you mount it as a network drive and browse it using explorer or do you have to use some lame software package to view the files? i'm interested in one of the qnap nas's that has two drives and want to put all my media files/important docs onto it so that they can be redundant but i want easy access to them too so that my htpc doesn't have any hiccups.

[kaidomac]

I'm a big fan of FreeNAS. You could do a Celeron-based system and a couple 250gb drives for under $400. You can go with either software RAID (extremely reliable nowadays) or a cheap 2-port SATA RAID card (Rosewill has one for under $30 on Newegg). Here's a good guide:

http://www.orionmods.com/blog/?p=5

It has SMB, AFP, NFS, FTP, etc. etc. Read up here:

http://www.freenas.org/