Thanks Bob!

That's 100 quid I've saved. How much the Thecus?

Grazie

I second farss - I use the Thecus 5200 Pro with 5 X 1 TB HDDs running in RAID5 mode - that gives me 4TB of usable. It works great. Unfortunately, the price will be closer to the $2000 mark if you get it fully equipped.

Perhaps before we make Grazie's head spin like his Solo used to we should ask what his needs are.
If you've only got one or two PCs there's not much point to the expense of any NAS. You can buy a number of external disk box thingies with RAID 1 or 5 that connect via USB / Firewire / eSATA that'll serve your needs admirably.

The advantage of a NAS is the unit sits on your network and is accessible by all PCs on the network. You can put the NAS anywhere you have a network connection and largely forget about it. This is a real boon for us where we've many PCs wirring away all around the house BUT you pay around USD 700 for the box over the price of the disks. You have to workout if that's value for your needs or not.

Even though we have that NAS anything that is in need of serious archiving still goes onto MAM Gold media in a file. We keep a copy and national archives has a copy as well. To be frank just buying a box without thinking through your archiving needs and what stuff is worth to you and your clients can be throwing money away. And yes for the record, no, my archiving is a bit of a mess. It's harder and takes more effort than you realise. Just having stuff 'somewhere' is useless if you can't reliably Find It!

Bob.

I have that exact NAS (Buffalo Linkstation Live) and I like it! I paid $207 USD for it back in January. It is very quiet (which was a big selling point for me) and it is a lot more than just a NAS. It is a print server and a media server as well. I bought it because I was tired of having of my wife and kids having to turn on my PC to share my printer, MP3 files, and family photos. So the printer is now plugged into the Linkstation and my entire MP3 library is on there and the Linkstation supports the iTunes protocol so when my kids open their iTunes they see all the music on the drive centrally located as an iTunes server. All of our photos are on there too. It will even serve up videos using any DLNA Certified media player so you can store all of your videos on their and watch movies from it.

One thing I was disappointing with is that it I could not serve movies from it to my PS3 which is supposed to be DLNA Certified. You see I was hoping to use the PS3 to watch movies off of the Linkstation. So it only gets 4 stars from me because I could not use it for one of the purposes I bought it for.

As you can tell, I did not buy this for video editing nor do I use it for that. It's a little Linux server that allows my family to share files and a printer. I have since purchase a network printer that has a scanner and it shares a folder on the Linkstation for the scans so anyone can scan a document and then go to the Linkstation and use it on their PC effectively giving everyone access to the scanner.

For video editing storage I bought an AMS Venus T5 enclosure which came with an eSATA card. You can put in up to 5x1TB drives in JBOD, RAID 0 or RAID 5. This is connected to my editing PC via eSATA so it's just like having them as internal SATA drives. I agree with the others that a direct attached enclosure is probably all you need for video editing unless you need to be able to access it from several PC's, then a NAS is great because it's always on.

~jr

Seen a 4 bay = Sonnet Fusion D400 RAID Desktop, Silver, 3.5" SATA II Enclosure to eSATA II/Firewire/Mini USB

***** £ £514.59 Inc VAT ********

Don't see hard discs involved in this price either?

Grazie

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=799170This one . . . [/link]

Grazie

No disks included. You buy them yourself and slide them into the unit. Pretty simple process installing the disks and building the RAID.
As JR points out these are more than just a place to dump files however if you don't need that extra functionality and don't have multiple PCs a couple of naked disks you drop into the SATA adaptor you already have would meet your needs just as well for less dollars.

Bob.

Yes I know it doesn't have any discs.

Yes I know I would have to buy and install them separately.

And NO, this isn't a simple task for this chap!

My point was to show just how much a stack system of discs costs here in UK. The one jr has, sourced in the US WITH a free SATA card is not available here in the UK.

OK?

Grazie

Grazie,

Here is another avenue.

<a href="http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticleSrc.jhtml?articleID=183702383" target="_blank">Check This Out</a>

Bob

Hi Grazie, how are you mate?

My previous storage was a WD box with 2 mirrored HDDs inside, but although it came wih a GB Ethernet connection, the access speed was as slow as a very slow thing and I could not live with it for very long. The access speed problem was due to the internal controller chip design which could not support faster data transfer. So GB Ethernet in the spec does not tell the whole story.

Anyway, after some research, I recently bought a Netgear NV+ NAS with 4 hard drives in a sort of RAID5 config, and it is working fine for me. Bob is right as usual though, you do need to think through your backup/storage/archival strategy. I have already filled 48% of my NAS and at this rate will probably need to get another one before the end of the year.

Richard