Looking for home NAS.

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Stugots

Supreme [H]ardness
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Feb 25, 2004
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I'm looking to buy a NAS for home. I've been looking at getting either DLink DNS-321 or a DNS-323. I've also been researching into building my own and running FreeNAS.

Basically, I'm looking for people opinions on whether an out of the box system like a DLink or simialar (if you know of a better one, please let me know); or building my own NAS would be better.

Here are some of the things I'm looking to accomplish.
  • iTunes server
  • uPNP/DLNA server
  • easy drive replacement and upgrading
 
How much storage space do you need and how much room for expansion? Are noise and power consuption a big concern for you? Some of the off the shelf solutions are fine for storing a few files and some light torrent work but if you want anything with more than a handful of drives a build your own solution is hard to beat.
 
I've also been researching the same thing. The DLink units are decent, but there's better for the money. Check out http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews for some good reviews. Looking at the prices and benchmarks there, the Synology and Qnap units look to be the best price/performance.

The real advantage with buying an appliance is that you just plug in the drives and go. There's very little configuration, and all the config stuff is well documented and you can call the company for support if you need it.

The disadvantage to the appliance solution is that they are not very expandable. And if it doesn't come with a certain feature, you usually can't add it later.

Building your own can be cheaper, especially if you already have hardware you can recycle into the project. It's expandability depends on the hardware you chose. And in most cases, its expandability depends entirely on how much you want to spend to expand it.

The disadvantage to building your own is that it will take a lot more time: planning, assembling, installing an OS, configuring the OS, adding features, etc. In most cases, you won't find much in the way of easy support when building your own. Take, for example, Free NAS: their online documentation stinks. Google and YouTube become your support mechanism. If you're OK with that, then I say build your own.
 
I'm looking to run at least 2x1TB drives to start. Noise isn't a problem because it'll be sitting in my office.
 
I've had a DNS-323 for a few years now. It is a very noisy and slow system. It does work fine though if you can put up with those two issues.
 
I bought a Synology DS410, but I considered building my own also. I'd like to play around with FreeNAS at some point, but Synology has a great reputation (along with Qnap as mentioned earlier, and Thecus).
 
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