Hi all, I've decided that I really need to get myself some form of NAS box, but I am utterly clueless about this sort of thing It doesn't need to be anything fancy at all. I'm basically looking for an external HDD that connects to the network, if that makes sense? I don't need any fancy pants features, I just need something that I can use to share files between laptop and desktop and connect to my TV for streaming. I don't anticipate a heavy load on the NAS as it's unlikely that more than a couple of devices are going to be accessing it simultaneously. What would you guys recommend? Budget is about £100 at the most, and that needs to include an HDD (probably not more than 1TB will be needed in the first instance). Go easy on me if this is horribly basic or stupid stuff, I have less than no clue about this stuff Cheers in advance.
For such a small budget I would be looking in the used market for a cheap atom net top or something like this. Those make a good htpc/nas, but you will be limited to a single 2.5" hdd.
Cheers IvanIvanovich, will give that some consideration. Now I'm home, I've remembered that I've got a spare 3.5" HDD sitting in a box Budget is £100 tops, no HDD required.
One of the HP Microservers could serve you well if you find one to suite you. EDIT: Doesn't seem like they've been on a £100 deal recently, perhaps try the marketplace for one?
For about £100 you could get a Thecus N2310. I read a review on pcper.com and it looked like a decent bit of kit for the price. I have been very tempted.
I've got a Zyxel NSA325v2 and I can't fault it at all, works without a hitch on our windows and os x systems!
What broadband router do you have? A lot of them now come with the ability to plug in an external HD and share it.
I've got a VM Superhub so I think that's a no-go, Fingers66. By happy coincidence, the latest issue of Custom PC landed on my doormat today and the Labs Test is... NAS Boxes! Will read up and see what the score is.
If you are happy doing a bit of configuring, and also happy using external hard drives then you could look at a raspberry pi. Your only issue here would be the spindown of the disk and figuring out how to back up your data (copying to other areas of the network will be slow as it is over usb. Plenty fast enough for streaming a 1080p/high bit rate film though). By backup I mean having more than 1 copy of the data so that you are resilient to the loss of a HDD, not something that would be resistant to power cuts / house fire etc. Plenty of step by step guides out there to set something like this up, even simple ones that I can follow! It's worth you having a quick google and whilst the downside is file transfer speed the upside is that you can get the Pi to do a couple of other tasks for you as well (web server, remote access to network / files etc)
You can buy a new D-Link DNS-320 2 bay NAS for less than a second hand single bay Synology would cost. http://www.scan.co.uk/products/d-li...-12-in-1-nas-server-with-raid-gigabit-usb-ftp
I have one of these and it's fine but it's SLOOOWWWW! I wish I was exaggerating but sadly I'm not. Once you have eventually got your data on it though, it's really good for the price.