Any recommendations on a RAID NAS?
 

Need to upgrade the NAS, since it has way to much importance to our business.

Any recommendations on a RAID NAS?

Iomega has one - 2TB using 2 drives for $259, 4 drives is $399
WD has a 2TB one using 4 drives for $350

Alternatives?

If you are looking for an "appliance" take a look at Synology America Corp. - NEW NAS Experience - or Data Robotics, Inc..

I'm getting a couple of these at work, but it might be outside your price range

I had a couple of Buffalo Terrastations at my last company, we needed a relatively fault tolerant device for storage of stuff that was somewhat important, but not important enough to backup to our already taxed tape backups.

Buffalo Technology - Products - Network Storage

Worked pretty well for what they were, Gig-E connection with native (although somewhat clunky to configure) active directory support. They were not as fast as I would have liked, but not too bad, and for the role they worked fine.

Tom

The drobo looks good. I like the idea of swapping in new drives of unmatched capacity whenever you see a good deal on bare drives.

Curious, like typical raid configurations will the array's capacity be limited to a multiple of the smallest capacity drive?

Meaning if you have 5 2 gb drives you get 10 gb (forgetting parity etc...) but if you have 4 2 gb drives and 1 1 gb drive get only 5 gb losing the other 4.

The Drobo has a way to use max capacity of all drives so in 2nd scenario you have 9 gb?

Got a link?

Yeah, I'm not dropping $1499 right now. I'm looking for under $500...

The business has produced 5GB of data in the past year. A 2TB unit would be serious OVERKILL at this point. I guess I'm also trying to decide the difference between a 2 disk Raid and one of the more advanced 4 disk units.

I'm using an old Buffalo Link Station. It has a nightly backup feature, but not RAID, since it is a single disk, but allows one external USB disk.

Well, I guess since I don't care about "striping" to maximize the data between the drives. And 4 drives will show up as 2 drives.

I have the Netgear NasDuo as well and love it. Right now have two drives and a total of 2.5 terrabytes inside and right at $250 total cost, so its well worth it for me.

For this price it was good protection and now I can backup everything in the system there.

I have the Netgear ReadyNAS Duo as well. Started with 2x1TB drives which was like $600 at the time! Now I have 2x1.5TB drives in it. I actually had a failure in one of the 1TB drives, and it worked as advertised - no data loss and I was able to upgrade the capacity with a minor bit of fiddling. We use it to archive photos, videos, and as a print server for our laptops. It can also stream media to iTunes and PS3 etc. Very versatile device.

I agree with Wayne that it's amazing how we have this technology in our homes now, at mass-market commodity prices!

So what do I need and how do I hook it up to my TV so that I can play all sorts of my music while all my photos and videos of the kids just stream over the TV? I don't want to develop some crazy long presentation, just something that will grab all my pics and show each for a few seconds then on to the next all the while playing a bunch of music filesI have. It would be cool to do during parties and while relatives are over.

Data Robotics, Inc.

drobo

they have some different models now, I hadn't seen before

I mean to get something like this and put it in an enclosure away from the house. So that if the house burns, the data survives.

The NetGear can do that but not directly to my TV - needs a PS3/XBox or something like that in between. Some new TV's are probably networkable directly.

Another option is an Apple TV if you are a Mac/Apple kinda guy. They get mixed reviews but I'm sure they do what they do fairly well.

Yet another option would be a Windows Media (PC) connected to the TV.

Have not gotten that far with my system but believe you can do this running through at TIVO or other DVR system.

Don't forget Linksys by Cisco. They have a good NAS solution; ftp, smb, NFS, as well as encryption.

Good price point for what you get.

NSS6100

What part of under $500 is hard to understand?

I bought the 2TB StorCenter ix2-200 Network Storage NAS Server for $259 from Dell.