Hi All,

I am about to make the leap from my sometimes working media server to something that I do not have to babysit so much. I did a search on the forum and couldn't find that much from recently. I'm looking to spend as little as possible, unless there is a decent reason (looking around between 500 and 1000$). The features I am probably after:

- Reliable (Raid mirroring at some level)
- Able to have around 4 HDD's internally + external options (1TB+ per drive)
- Must be able to do DNLA and BT (for getting linux iso's)
- Speed would be nice, but not the biggest concern
- I want it as cheap as possible, so drive free if possible, I have enough HDD's lying around
- Easily upgradable / extendable for upgrading amount of storage (only a semi-big deal)

Don't need any fancy permissions/AD type stuff, its for home use.

My initial preference is the:

Thecus 4100B Black (517$ at Umart)

It appears to do everything I need (not sure about upgradability), however looking at the competitors, its a lot cheaper. I'm definitely not an expert in this are, any thoughts/recommendations greatly greatly appreciated.

cheers

PS. I also posted this on OCAU, but it seems their storage forum is more hardcore raid centered rather than home media use

I've looked at various NAS solutions with BT client, but ultimately I won't touch them for the sole reason that none can do any filtering like PeerGuardian or SafePeer does.
Commercially available NAS solutions are ridiculously expensive for what they are and what they do.

You might want to look at the new Western Digital offering.

I've got that thecus NAS box.

the BT client is............ well i guess serviceable if you're determined to use it, but i don't and wouldn't.

I don't find much wrong with it, especially singe upgradeing to vista it's alot better to use. But i do wish i'd bought the 5200-pro instead. It's twice the price, but sometimes the lack of CPU power is really noticeable.

Basically, now that i've gone away from XP (for what ever reason i could not get that thecus box and XP to work nicely together, whether it have been some bizzare hardware conflict on my old pc or something as it worked fine with other XP machines.) I don't have any complaints about the box, it's tiny, compact, takes 5 hdd's, gigabit, runs a media server, ftp server, and works fine over windows networking. But i do find my self regretting not buying the 5200 pro.

wow, I searched for 4100B Thecus and your thread from OCAU came up
http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?p=9909388

not many pages on it around

looked at the umart page for it, looks pretty s*** hot - maybe a touch expensive but thats subjective
worth taking into account that you'll be up for another $600~ to get 3TB (4x1TB drives in raid5)

I have 3.5~TB using a combo of internal drives & usb external drives, cost me way less than $1k

I have the 5200 pro here and have no compaints at all, works like a charm.

Have nothing to compare it to though :)

I plan to buy the N7700 at some stage, fill it with 1TB drives. Its gonna be sweeeeet.

mmm spending 500 bucks on a NAS...just upgrade ya media centre!

Old PC + OEM copy of Windows Home Server FTW.

Get the 120day free trial and check it out. It is pretty funky.

Does WHS offer software RAID?

There are reasons to choose a NAS over a PC. For example, a server uses a lot more power and is noisier than a NAS device. The n5200 has heaps of power scaling options with scheduling etc.

trog, yes. it is done on a share level, not disk level. and it is raid1 only.

I used to run old pc as my storage/server box. but got sick of maintaining another PC, and these thecus NAS boxes are TINY, quiet, have good web interfaces, and just seem like less hastle to run.

I'd recomend them to anyone, but i'd recommend the 5200 pro.

If use a second box get a KVM switch. Then moving your keyboard, mouse and monitor is just a double-click (scroll lk key) away.

This might be out of the price range but I just read a review over at Toms Hardware on a Lacie DAS. It looks very cool and they gave it a good review, comes in 2TB, 4TB and 6TB configurations. You can't beat ESata for its transfer rates either.

The thecus is great, but can be a bit slow at times. I just use it for streaming videos etc from so it's fine, but a friend with one bitches about it as he has his photo collection on there, and browsing through them can take a few seconds to load a image.

Old PC + OEM copy of Windows Home Server FTW.

Get the 120day free trial and check it out. It is pretty funky.

Glad you had better luck than I did Ara , I used it twice, once before PP1 and once after on different hardware and both times it screwed itself up and cost me data :(

I run server 2k8, 3 drives in raid 5 and ultra important archive stuff like photos in a mirror. Rock solid now :)

I run server 2k8, 3 drives in raid 5 and ultra important archive stuff like photos in a mirror. Rock solid now :)

I run something similar, but am also looking to incorporate offsite replication using something like Live Mesh or the Google Cloud.

A Thecus sitting at a mate's place would be great for that. It supports rsync so you could easily script it to run an hourly rsync from your main data store to a thecus. Sure it's not real time, but it's not bad.

I run something similar, but am also looking to incorporate offsite replication using something like Live Mesh or the Google Cloud.

Perhaps amazon's s3?

---

Okay, looking like I should be aiming at something along the lines of the n5200b.

Is there much/any difference between the N5200B and the N5200B Pro

and

The cheapest place to buy? Im assuming umart?

Since the OP has had his question answered and mine is similar I'll just hijack this thread :p

I don't find much wrong with it, especially singe upgradeing to vista it's alot better to use. But i do wish i'd bought the 5200-pro instead. It's twice the price, but sometimes the lack of CPU power is really noticeable.

What do you do on it? The 4100 and 5200 both seem to have an intel 600mhz CPU, I assume that would be plenty for a print server + file storage, how does it go for streaming?

Also I assume you don't need any 3rd party software to access the stuff on these things, just like accessing a network file share?
The past couple of days I've been thinking about getting one of these again, I looked at them a few months ago but decided to just get a couple of USB hard drives & move them from PC to PC but now I'm sort of wanting to centralise it all including the printer so my main PC doesn't have to be on to print.





last edited by whoop at 22:44:44 19/Jan/09