NAS reccomendations?

[Tony]

Looking to get

1. One I can plop onto the network with a static IP that will let me
mount it as a drive/folder on our home-networked PCs. Guess that
would mean it would need samba/ntfs?

2. Looking to do something like 2x320gb or 2x500gb SATA in a Raid 1
config.

3.Looking for ability to give device a unique name on my network

4. Looking to set up user accounts on the NAS to limit access if
someone happens to get on my Lan (doubtful)


Pretty much as a safe haven for things like resumes, pasword protected
files containing other passwords (heh), pictures etc...

Would you have any thoughts/suggestions for me?? would ya??

Everyone I see that matches closly to what i'm looking for on Newegg
has people saying it's garbage as well as others saying it's great..

Thanks for any suggestions.

Tony!

 

[Andrew Smallshaw]

Looking to get

1. One I can plop onto the network with a static IP that will let me
mount it as a drive/folder on our home-networked PCs. Guess that
would mean it would need samba/ntfs?

2. Looking to do something like 2x320gb or 2x500gb SATA in a Raid 1
config.

3.Looking for ability to give device a unique name on my network

4. Looking to set up user accounts on the NAS to limit access if
someone happens to get on my Lan (doubtful)

This came up on a.c.h.h. a few weeks ago - I suggest you look
through the archives. No one was able to cite a decent consumer
level NAS. Decent NAS's exist but they are not the consumer level
devices: it is the higher end units that work properly but for the
price of those you can buy a fully equipped PC, never mind a
minimalist box for file serving.

If you still want to go for a NAS device, steer clear of LaCie for
reliability reasons. Steer clear of WD for performance reasons.
I particularly resent WD at the moment because a couple of weeks
ago I spent a full morning investigating a network outage which
looked like the switch. Swapped out the switch - itself not a
trivial task since this was an almost-full 16 port unit with the
usual standard of cable 'management'. Still no joy. Reconnecting
each node individually and testing inbetween showed it to be a WD
NAS sat at the end of the room. Reboot the NAS and suddenly
everything worked. I'm not impressed that a) it fell over in the
first place - it is doing a simple job and no way of monitoring
except the network - it _should_ be bulletproof and b) it fell over
in such a way that it managed to take out an entire network segment.

As for your specific questions most NAS will cover them - there is
nothing in your requirements remotely unusual. A couple of questions
though:

What do you mean by a name on the network? WINS or DNS? If the
former that will be sorted out automatically by the SMB portion of
the device. A DNS name is allocated externally. If you don't have
a DNS server set up locally (which needs to be running all the
time) you need to add a line to the /etc/hosts file on each network
node - on Windows this is %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.

Authentication is dependent on the protocol used to access the
filesystem. For SMB you _should_ have the usual methods of protection
available as you do when sharing files between computers.