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A NAS server for my home

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dluby:
Hi,

I was thinking of buying a NAS for at home but I've no experience with them and I'm looking for advice.

I'll give you some background on my needs:

I have a video, music and photograph collection that I would like to be able to share at home with my family (2 PCs,  three laptops and a smartphone).  I'd also like to be able to access the NAS from the internet (read/write).  I don't have eSATA or USB 3.0.

Ideally I'd like one that has 2GB+ storage.  ON my first search I came across this product from Seagate: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/external-hard-drive/desktop-hard-drive/

If anybody has advice of what to buy (or look out for), I'd appreciate it.

Thanks

40hz:
Take a look at PogoPlug.  :-*

It's inexpensive, web-enabled, and works really well. Storage capacity is up to you. Just plug in one or two USB external drives with whatever capacity you feel you need.

There are a bunch of video reviews up on YouTube where you can see it in action.

Shop around for it too. Some places offer it at discount. The Pink version is an absolute steal if you don't need built-in wifi. It can always be added later for about $30 should you change your mind. If you already have a WAP/Router combo, you don't really need it.

I love this little gadget.  8)

edbro:
Does the Pogo have a media server running on it? I've heard a lot of good things about the pogos.

I have an older HP Mediavault. I love it but my version is limited in it's expansion capability. It maxes out at 2 TB. Sounds like a lot until you start filling it up. There are newer versions that handle more capacity. They are Linux based and have media streaming capability. No wifi as far as I know.

40hz:
^Yes, it does stream.  I've only played with that feature a bit so I can't vouch how good it works in a production setting. It is, however, one of their big marketing claims and I haven't read of any major problems with it. About the only complaint I did hear was a while back and concerned stuttering issues when streaming music and video to an XBox via wifi.

When I briefly noodled with it, steaming media worked fine for me. But I was also on a gigabit LAN connection so there shouldn't be any surprise there. My day-to-day use for Pogo is as a repository for software. That and my technical library in PDF format.

Kinda boring, but that's me.  :)

4wd:
I just started playing with FreeNAS, (mainly for data backup - I don't have anything to stream to....yet), and I have to say that it was exceptionally easy to get going.

An unused EPIA SP8000EG with 1GB DDR, booting off of a old 1GB Flash drive with, (currently), an old 160GB SATA HDD as storage, (encrypted UFS for which it's using the dedicated AES hardware on the motherboard).  About the only time I had to refer to the docs was to find out what the default user/password was  :-[

EDIT: Oh yeah, it's also equipped with a Gb LAN card so it actually gets 40MB/s transfer rate as opposed to my DLink DNS-313 Gb interface which gets 3MB/s and a friends QNAP Dual Bay NAS whose Gb interface manages to get 10MB/s.

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