Question from a reader:

A few of my friends and me, are all Mac users and in the market to look for a sub $400 NAS system (excluding actual drives) that can serve as the obvious file server, itunes server, has USB ports to connect and access data from external drives as well as perhaps use it as further space and gigabit Ethernet would also be a bonus. I am also very keen to use this drive with time machine. We were wondering if you have any suggestions or real world experience with using such an appliance.

That's a touch question because people have different ideas of what they want from a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, although this reader has given a fair bit of information.

Before I go on with my two picks, I need to make a few things clear about NAS devices:

• They're pretty expensive for what you are getting (especially considering that you need to add up to four hard drives to the price).
• They're not all that fast - if you put a small cheap PC on the network and used it for storage, it would be probably be faster than most NAS devices.
• NAS devices can be a pain to set up - you'll probably need to mess about with firmware updates, dig through setup menus that are full of mystery meat settings and contend with very poor documentation.
• They can be noisy and hot.

There are upsides though:

• Once working, they've usually very reliable.
• They offer a pretty painless way to use RAID file system redundancy.
• Usually fitting and replacing disks is pretty easy.

So, which devices would I recommend? Well, I have two:

• D-Link DNS-343 - 4 disk NAS - $405
• Thecus N3200 - 3 disk NAS - $340

If you want the maximum storage space, go for the D-Link, but if you want performance and extra features, then I'd go for the Thecus.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 17:50 and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.