Choosing Hard Drives for a NAS

Computerworld (Michael Horowitz) has a post about choosing hard drives for a NAS. The post goes through the thought process in choosing a small NAS. He chose a single drive NAS and a 1 TB Western Digital Red drive - all for the purpose of simplicity:
Besides having fewer tickets in the hard drive failure lottery, the single platter 1TB model will use a bit less electricity, will run a bit quieter (according to published specs) and should run cooler (always a good

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Recommendations for NAS to Work with IMAC

There is the beginnings of a thread over at the Macrumors forum from a user asking for recommendations for a NAS to work well with an IMAC. The first response is another recommendation for UnRaid:
I have had an unRAID setup running 24/7 for several years. My array consists of 8 drives, one of which is for parity. While it's not the fastest system around, it does its job effectively and efficiently.

I share your concerns with having just one parity drive and this is the primary reason why I

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Synology DSM 5.0 Beta

Synology is going to reveal a new version of its operation system (Diskstation Manager) 5.0 (at least a beta version) in January in London. No word from Synology as to what DSM 5 holds in store, but if you follow the link below, you can register to be among the first to know on January 16th in

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Official HP Microserver Owners Wiki and Thread

For owners of the popular HP Microserver that can be used as a NAS with a number of different NAS distributions, there is a wiki and discussion thread over at http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/HP_MicroServer_N40L_Wiki.

Great little hardware that is remarkable

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Drobo 5D: Not Exactly a NAS but Speedy Storage Using USB 3 or Thunderbolt

There is a nice review over at TUAW of the 5 drive Drobo 5D - an attached storage device that provides for both USB3 and Thunderbolt connectivity. The review includes a good description of the Drobo and speed test results with both USB 3 and Thunderbolt:
The tests were performed both with Thunderbolt and USB 3.0. Using Thunderbolt, the standard test results (nine different file sizes between 4 KB and 1024 KB) showed average speeds as follows:

Sequential Read: 140.504 MB/Sec
Sequential

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Roll your own Synology DiskStation for NAS Do it Yourself

Over at the AVSforum, there is an interesting thread that includes instructions and a download link to allow you to turn a computer into a NAS using a version of Synology's diskstation software. The thread is eleven pages long and has many interesting posts. Overall, this approach does not seem feasible for any but advanced computer users. But, if you are interested in experimenting with NAS distributions, this is another approach:
Synology made NASs are one of the more popular home

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Thecus Has a New 2 Bay Raid 1 NAS - the N2310

This is the smallest Thecus NAS to date (as far as I can recall). The new NAS runs the full Thecus OS6 software that includes just about everything that a NAS can run including Plex media server. It includes a bitorrent client, FTP, RSYNC and just about the whole kitchen sink of NAS related software.

The new Thecus only sports a AMCC APM 86491 800 MHz SoC with 512 MB of DDR3 RAM, so don't expect super fast performance when transcoding video files. For normal file serving, this

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