Network attached storage

Anyone have any experience?

I need a NAS I can remove each evening that can do an autobackup of 5 machines - seen this : http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=719111

Any good?

stay away from the 'mybook' series of stuff, we got one at work, its great hardware, but the software is awful.

Might be an idea to just get yourself a cheap/old computer and load it up with HDD's? then you have more options.

is this "mybook"?

is this "mybook"?

I really want a LAN solution that I can remove from the premises when I leave.

No, MyBooks are by western digital. That one looks nice, however you are still trusting your backup to 1 drive. See if you can find one that has those features, but has 2 drives that you can put in a raid array.

I got one of these yesterday (cost about 60 quid):
LinkSys NSLU2 (or 'SLUG')
http://tinyurl.com/229fgu
Good and has a very good user base/group but can be fiddly to do advanced stuff.

Previously I was using a generic NAS drive case that I could drop my own drive into. About 30 quid from Maplins.

Freecom seem to make good stuff on the whole so your suggestion might be your best solution.

Indiepath, you can get that one you posted cheaper here:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/128483

I can't comment on the Freecom Network drive as you picture there, but I have a stadard USB Freecom drive and I think it's excellent in terms of quality and price. Make sure they're still using the Samsung Spinpoint internally. I swear by these drives.

ebuyer has some very interesting comments on the NAS drives. I was into one but most (esp. wireless ones) got really crappy ratings.

I've got the 500gb freecom network drive mentioned above and it's been no trouble to use whatsoever.

I've got for the last Christam a Packard Bell NetStore 3500.
It's not targeted for professional use I believe, but it works.
The bad things are:
1 - it's deadly slow on LAN!!! (compared with the USB 2.0 speed)
2 - it uses a FAT32 partitition, so you can NOT save/manage file bigger than 2Gb (so if you want save AV file...)
3 - you can have more than one partition, but the other ones cannot be shared/be accessible via LAN!

I don't know the specs of the product linked, but I must advise you only on the point 2) and 3) [of course these limitations are not well displayed by the producer...arg!]

Byez

btw, I have a couple of MyBooks (not NAS) and they were pig slow as Fat32 at small files (even though that's compatible with MAc) so I reformatted as NTFS and it's as fast as a internal hard drive now - amazing!

The D-Link DNS-323 is quite good, although data transfer is slow at 20Mbs

Thanks everyone, looks like I'll get this one after all.

Btw Perturbatio that one does not have a gigabit card.

I don't know if you've bought one already but my work has just purchased a Buffalo TeraStation Pro (4GB) and it does automated network backup and many other things.

If you need it portable, as others have mentioned, I suggest the "SLUG" (Linksys NSLU2). You can easily flash the firmware and run linux on the system.

Before I decided to build out a linux server just for the NAS, I was running one of these little puppies and was quite impressed. It handled all of my file sharing needs, backup needs, and I had an ssh server running which allowed me to do ssh tunneling instead of poking holes in my firewall for remote access to my home devices. I also was able to run ctorrent to remotely manage torrent downloads.

I still think the best idea is to just build up a computer from newegg and have a dedicated linux machine as your NAS.