Be Excellent To Each Other

Can anyone recommend me a NAS? It’s for one of my mates and his budget is max £350 including disks.

I’ve always used a Thecus which is out of my mate’s budget and so have very little idea what else is worth looking at.

Requirements are
1. No fuss (no PC clients needed etc)
2. 1Gb network
3. SMB
4. Simple interface and well supported in terms of firmware etc

He just wants to plug it in, configure his folders and start to share out media.

Any suggestions would be very welcome

Christ, that's a lot of money
I've got a 2TB Buffalo Linkstation (£142) which has all the stuff above plus a built-in version of uTorrent. You can plug a USB hard drive into it for additional storage.

You do need to use the PC client once for initial set-up, but as you need to set the IP I don't really see how you can get around that.

to both of those statements. I think our latest NAS box at work (an LG one, although we've got a Buffalo one too) was only expensive because it has a Blu-ray writer built into it.

I have a Drobo, it works well enough, but isn't the quickest thing in the world when setup as an independent NAS, so much so that I have directly connected it to my iMac and share the content via that. (My iMac is never turned off anyway) and it reboots at random once every few months.

It does the job, but I wouldn't recommend buying one to anyone else I would probably go for a ReadyNAS of some variety if I was buying now.

His budget is based on a 4TB WD Mybook he found on Play.com at around £330 or so.

4TB is mighty big. Does he need that much space?

The MyBook World NAS devices are excellent, I've been running with a 2x1TB version for about 18 months ago, I honestly haven't had to touch the thing in over a year, or log into the web interface to do anything, it just sits there and works. (It was a bit dodgy on the original firmware, but the updated version released around 15 months ago means it's never missed a beat.)

It does everything you want, and they're passively cooled as they use low power drives so no fans, therefore effectively silent in operation.

Reasonable file and folder permissions controlled with groups and users too, so you can make it 'PC novice safe', in my case Mrs AE can look at all the family photos and music collection for example, but she can't delete or modify or add anything in those folders.

And she can't see my porn either.

(But she has her own area which I've stuck a 100GB quota on which she can do what she likes with.)

There are quite a few advanced options available there too, but TBH I've never had much cause to muck about with them. You don't need any client software installed either, you can just let the NAS get an IP address off your router, and then log into it from any web browser on your network.

I just access mine with a UNC path, \\mybookworld\shared for example.

All of the above goes for the Linkstations, too (except for maybe the IP thing, I'm pretty sure you need to assign it a static IP, but I don't know why I think that now ) - plus handy built-in torrent client.


[edit]Oh, which I mentioned

The Linkstation is certainly pretty keen for the price, I suppose people tend to recommend what they've had a good experience with, and in my case the MyBook World has been superb, insofar as I set the thing up and never had to touch it again.

/waits for MyBook World to explode.

If you hide all your porn from the Mrs, can your TV/PS3/360 whatever find it?

Like I wouldn't have double checked that

So how do you watch the porn on the TV?

Thanks for the feedback

He is looking at 4TB as he knows enough people who could fill that twice over with stuff for him, he also has some music and stuff of his own from an Apple TV that he is sick off and has replaced with an ASrock and XBMC.

I've sent him options as per your postings and also included the Thecus N4100 which at £309 diskless is a budget breaker but for £120 more he could buy 4 1 TB drives and have RAID 5.



I don't understand why you need to keep porn on your PC these days. If you can't find something to float your boat on YouPorn then there is no hope for you

I have a mate who keeps it on his PC in a folder he sets to hidden so his wife can't find it!

If he really wants to get spending there is an 8TB Linkstation - it looks the dogs too: http://www.buffalo-technology.com/produ ... tion-quad/

...and have 3Tb? Isn't that not enough?

Also, if you meant RAID0, don't do that -- ideally ever, but particulalrly over four disks. You have 4x the chance of one drive failing, compared to a single drive setup, and your friend will lose the lot if it goes. Even if it's stuff he can copy or download again, there's still a lot of time involved in those processes when you're measuring data by the terabyte.

I don't.