NAS or nothing?

real_ate

Ok... a quick recap on my situation: I’m currently trying to get rid of my monster of a pc (it’s a games beast with tonnes of storage!) with mind of getting a laptop. but unfortunately for me I’m only getting rid of it for one of its two qualities, the gaming, and it is leaving me with a great need and desire to have some other means of storing large quantities of stuff....
this is when I stumble over these NAS systems, I have never heard of them before today and they seem to be the answer that I have been looking for!!
The only thing is I’m afraid that if I buy one of these now I will either get something that is terrible quality or will be out of date in 5 mins!
If anyone knows a lot about this any info will be much appreciated!
Thanks

SouperComputer

If you have alot of drives and plan expanding or adding in the future, its probably best to build your own.

A PII/PIII PC is fine, 128MB RAM. Of course you may need SATA or ATA card(s) to support your drives. Software wise if you are even a little bit handy with linux, clarkconnect is an excellent web-based distro. Of course you can add features later web-based bittorrent is one handy one.

If you want the ultimate in lightweight software, then you could use freeNAS. Its a bit trickier to setup and administrate than clarkconnect. Also, its NAS or nothing really, so if you think any of the features of clarkconnect appeal to you (webserver, gateway, firewall, FTP, VPN etc) appeal to you then I would run with that. The hardware compaibility with freeNAS may also be a bit more limited.

If linux\BSD seem to daunting, then simply run windows 2000 behind a decent hardware firewall and installa software one. Set a fixedIP Share the directory you want, remove the "everyone" account from the share and setup the user's you want.

The only other thing to do is make sure that you pick a case that you can have plenty of airflow to keep those drives cool.

Foxwood

real_ate wrote:

Ok... a quick recap on my situation: I’m currently trying to get rid of my monster of a pc (it’s a games beast with tonnes of storage!) with mind of getting a laptop. but unfortunately for me I’m only getting rid of it for one of its two qualities, the gaming, and it is leaving me with a great need and desire to have some other means of storing large quantities of stuff....
this is when I stumble over these NAS systems, I have never heard of them before today and they seem to be the answer that I have been looking for!!
The only thing is I’m afraid that if I buy one of these now I will either get something that is terrible quality or will be out of date in 5 mins!
If anyone knows a lot about this any info will be much appreciated!
Thanks

If you only plan on having 1 laptop, you're probably better off sticking with a USB external drive.

Most of the "consumer" NAS boxes only have 100MB ethernet interfaces, so a USB2 or firewire drive will probably be faster and more portable. And you can probably pop the drive out of your existing box and stikc in in an external USB/Firewire enclosure, and use it immediately from your laptop, whereas atleast some of the consumer grade NAS boxes don't support NTFS, and woud require a full reformat of the drives before you could use them.

Unless you want to access your data from 2 or 3 machines, I'm not sure that a NAS is really the best way to go.

fatherdougalmag

Maybe a happy medium is to get a Linksys NSLU and a couple of USB HD enclosures for your drives.

real_ate

well it is meant to be for only one connection, ie the laptop, but i have ideas to share the resourse with a network. so what i was looking at was something that would be more than what i needed so i could upgrade my usage of it... think i'm gonna go for a low end pc instead of a NAS