Small network storage to use with Mac and PC

[timme]

Hello,

I am using the system in my signature along with a MacBook for various work and entertainment tasks. I got really tired of having data not on the right machine and pushing files around via network sharing or flash drives, so I decided to think about a centralized network storage to use with both machines.

With 'small', I'm talking about the range of 500GB to 1TB max., since I don't really have huge loads of data to save, just a lot of small project files for work and some Music/TV series.

I'm trying to spend as little as possible on this, since it is mostly a comfort thing, so a range of 100-150 Euro or 100-200$ excluding hard drives would be my limit.

Redundancy via RAID would be a great thing, but since I plan to use max. two HDDs, I guess I'm restricted to RAID 1 if anything.

I looked at some NAS cases where you just have to plug the HDDs, but the reviews I found were very different and I don't know which brands/manafacturers I should have a closer look at. It should work with both OSX and Vista/XP, very important. My experience with Linux is exactly none, so I would rather have something easy to set up and sacrifice some features

I hope this humble description helps to understand my situation, I would really appreciate any advice on the subject.

Thanks in advance,
Tim.

 

[timme]

I did some research on BYOD NAS Systems and narrowed the list down to these, from cheapest to most expensive:

Conceptronic Grab'n'GO NAS (130 Euro)
Don't know anything about this yet.

D-Link DNS-323 (150 Euro)
Seems to be really popular, good reviews

ZyXEL NSA-220 (170 Euro)
Looks good, not so many reviews

Synology Disk Station DS-207 (200 Euro)
By far the most expensive, but Synology shares all software features across their products, which is cool. Looks nice too, but I guess this blows my budget

Are there any black sheep in this list or definate recommendations?

Arguments for a ready-to-use NAS would be less usage of power and room, plus I guess it's hard to build a complete system (for Windows Home Server / Server 2003 / Server 2008) for 150-200 Euro.
I can get licenses for Server 2003 and Server 2008 from university (MSDNAA), but that still leaves me to a very tight budget for the hardware.