bigsinky

ok guys n gals, need some advice on NAS. I was wondering what are my alternatives. have been looking at thecus 5200 pro with 5 hot swap bays. i recently stuck another 5 x 500GB drives in my big machine using an adaptec sata card which takes up one of my x16pcie slots. now while this is fine i was wondering would it not be better to stick these drives in a standalone NAS enclosure so that my machine doesn't need to be on for others in my house to access the files on these drives. i know very little about linux and at the moment access to these drives is easy via windows file sharing. i have had a look at the manual and the web based gui for file access seems a bit convoluted. can i use this NAS just as JBOD (no interest in any RAID arrays) so that it is just like they are shared in windows. will XBMC still be able to stream video and music from these discs. it will take a load of my pc powerwise (though i have 2 x 730 hipers in there), i am just not sure its worth the hassle. i have already spent £65 on the adaptec card but the NAS is x10 the price (if bought in the uk) or about $700 if bought from the US.

I plan at a later stage to take out the 300GB drives (4 of them) and replace them with 1TB drives when they come down in price a bit more. samsung spinpoint 750GB drives are about £60 now so it should not be too long before the pricepoint on the 1TB drives comes down(end of the year maybe)

does anyone have any experience with NAS can anyone point me in the right direction.

TIA

jowl

I've been considering....

CS407

or even

DS508

Not cheap but seem to provide a lot of features - and will lower your power costs considerably I would imagine!

HankScorpio

I've got a smaller one - qnap 201 pro.
So easy to manage it's ridiculous.
So many features - it's also ridiculous.
web, ftp, p2p, itunes server, Twonkyu PnP, NFS, AD, users, groups, print server blah blah blah

With funds, I'd get a larger capacity qnap.

Iain Young

I've got a cs407e. Cracking piece of kit, reliable, packed full of features - well recommended. Currently got a couple of 750gb drives in it but will stick in a couple of additional 1TB drives when funds allow

stevem2k

It'll work as a raid or jbod , and you can map drives etc.

There are also a load of modules etc you can run on them. I run twonky for media streaming to the PS3 .

bigsinky

steve, will xbmc be able to connect to the drives if i have them mapped as ordinary NTFS volumes?

stevem2k

if they're mapped as something like \\N5200\folder\ then yes...

darlodge

We are using Qnap 209 Pro's. They rock! Have a look at some of the large RAID5 models.

www.qnapstore.co.uk

Darren

HankScorpio

D'oh - 209 - that's the one I've got, not 201

darlodge

The Pro model is almost the same but has the AD support (although it's a bitch to setup).

Darren

HankScorpio

Haven't tried it on mine as only at home but got the pro for NFS. They have brought out a new one (v II) but I don't no what differences it has.