Question from LinkedIn User:

What do you have to say about external NAS appliances for your home network?

I am looking to purchase a new NAS device for my home network. I would
prefer to have a RAID system that isn't dependent on one vendor for the
harddrives but if you feel strongly about a particular solution please
don't let that stop you from saying so. I expect the solution to have a
gigabit network card and would prefer RAID 1. 500 MB is fine but 1 TB
would be better.





My Answer:

I've set up the D-Link two-drive enclosure for a friend, but his main
need was to share music between a laptop, home desktop system, and one
for his kids. The D-Link product is $170-$200 with no drives, so you
could buy two 1TB SATA drives on your own. It's also sold with two
500GB drives for around $400. It's a far cry from the BlueArc NAS heads
I teach about for Hitachi Data Systems, but hey, it's a home unit!




The Data Robotics product is a bit more up-scale. Think of it as a
4-drive shelf where you can mix-and-match drives. You can start with a
single drive and scale up to all four as you go.




The big question would be, do you need a four-drive shelf? That's
4TB with no fault tolerance, or 2TB of RAID1, either way, that's a lot
of space for most home applications. Base investment in the Drobo
solution is $400 for the shelf, then $200 for the software, then $200
or so for each drive. No argument that Droboshare is much more robust
than other solutions, but the price tag is higher.