[mfsoa]

I've been trying to learn about hard-drive based storage for music files in anticipation of going this direction for my digital source. I guess the first thing to understand is the different storage options. I'm no PC expert and I've been learning about NAS drives. While they certainly are neat devices, man are they $$$ relative to the "400 GB for $100" specials that have been mentioned here. Why, an empty Infrant NAS box is $550. Maybe someone can help me understand what you really get for this expense. It seems like what you get is:

1) Ability to print from any networked PC. Cool, but not essential for me.

2) Easy RAID set-up. Again, cool, but I don't see the difficulty in manually backing up a main drive every once in a while to a secondary drive.

3) Ability to run SlimServer with the PC off. This is really nice if I go the Squeezebox route. Undecided on this now.

What am I missing? If two 400 GB drives gives you 400 GB of storage (assuming one is backup) for $200ish, then a comparable amount of NAS space would be like what $1000?

I can see maybe why a business would really benefit from a such a NAS, but please help me understand if this amount of extra $$$ is worth it to average Joe PC user.

Thanks for any advice!!

[dburna]

Bottom line: for an individual, it's just not worth the extra expense.  I looked into this in some detail both 3 years ago and this year.  In the end, I couldn't justify the extra cost just for RAID capability.  There are any number of ways to skin a cat with respect to networked printer access and such.  I finally decided on some basic drives (as you call them, "400GB for $100") in fanless aluminum USB cases and attached them to the back of either a laptop or an iMac I have kicking around.  Back up the drives once a month or so (I suppose more often if you are really crankin' the EAC recording during a specific period) and you should be just fine.  NAS features are fine for a small-to-medium size business, but it really seems like overkill for home use.....unless you're an uber-collector and have hundreds to thousands of movies stored in some kind of multiple-TB configuration.  Of course, if you can afford to set that up, you can afford to hire a struggling college student to do the backups for you!!   

Hope that helps.  Unless you're going to expand beyond about 4 mega-sized drives, just go the "single" route and put the savings towards some more music.

-dB

[JEaton]

An NAS is essentially a computer in itself.  Originally an NAS was just a plug and play appliance that offered a very simple, very quick way to add file storage capacity to a small business network.  Usually easier than adding file servers or expanding existing ones.

Consumer NASs for home and small businesses, though, have glommed on any number of applications such as FTP, file backup and even SlimServer.  What an NAS appliance like the Infrant offers is mostly just convenience in managing the RAID array contained within the device.  What you're paying for is 1) RAID (a decent RAID controller in itself can be quite expensive) 2) the internal computer that runs things and 3) the software to manage the NAS.

If you just need 400GB of file storage, and have a computer that can run whenever you want to listen to music, then buying a single large drive, plus one for backup, is the better way to go.  Once you outgro that and need terrabytes of space for thousands of albums, things get a bit more complicated.  If you'll grow into that situation over time, though, available hard drive capacities are expanding all the time.  We'll soon have 1000GB drives and no doubt 2000GB drives not long after.