Reccomend a NAS for me?

[mattb]

I have been running an old Celeron D system as a win2k3 server for years as my media server. I’m starting to think about getting rid of that old beast/heater and replacing it with a NAS to be more energy efficient. But I also don’t want to spend much so I’m not really sure what my best option(s) is/are.

• I’d like to run Firefly (of course!).
• Ideally, I’d like to be able to put three SATA drives in it as RAID 5, but would settle for two in RAID 1 if three is cost prohibitive. I’d consider PATA too if the price was right.
• A USB print server would also be nice, but again if this makes it a lot more costly, I’d get a separate one.
• Gigabit Ethernet would be nice but 100BT would be acceptable.
• Windows (or Samba) compatible

My collection is approaching 20,000 songs of mp3 and flac files if that factors into this at all.
I’m a decent DIYer and an IT pro. Linux would be ok but I’m more used to Windows. It seems that Linux is more standard in the NAS world and that’s fine with me.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

[fizze]

I got an Intel SS4200. It’s a nice and powerful NAS, albeit silent.
I think Futjitsu-Siemens sells it with WHS, but Intel sells it with EMC custom’d Linux.

And then of course you can just get the bare thing and put your own OS on it, like I did 😉

It’s not exactly cheap, but the bang-to-buck ratio is decent.

I’ve used a Linksys NSLU2 before, which is awesome in it’s resourcefulness. But then it’s not nick-named “slug” without reason.

[Anonymous]

Take a look at the Synology DS508 or the new DS509.

[Anonymous]

You seem somewhat flexible on your requirements so I would throw the HP MV21xx series Media Vaults into the mix. They will handle 2 Drives, RAID 1, come preinstalled with Firefly and Twonky, Gigabyte ethernet and have very good power specs. I believe SAMBA is supported.
Note that I have the previous version MV1 (MV2010), but I have heard very good things about the 2100 series too.

There is no print server, but I’ve had print servers in the past and they are usually frustrating to use because they are almost all unidirectional – so you never can get printer status on your pc anyway. Once you move to a real network printer you’ll never look back, and they only cost a little more than a print server anyway 🙂

[mattb]

Thanks for recommendations you guys! I saw a potential solution on sale the other day and jumped on it – hopefully it wasn’t a mistake! 🙄 I now have a D-Link DNS321 on the way. It was about $100 and I have a pair of 750GB drives to put in it as a RAID 1 configuration. I found instructions for installing Firefly/mt_daap on it so I’m going to give it a try. I also just got a D-Link USB print server ($20) so I’m going to give that a try too. I’ll probably be back when I’m getting it all set up. Thanks again!

[mattb]

Alright, I have my DNS-321 set up as RAID 1 with a couple of 750 GB drives. fun_plug for the DNS-323 works well, so now I just need to get mt_daap working which I may be posting about in the setup board. The hardware seems nice, hopefully I can make it do what I want and all will be well! Thanks again!

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