Recommendations for NAS?

Hi, all. I'm looking for a recommendation for a good, robust and feature-rich NAS solution. I recently bought a NSLU2, hoping to UNSLUNG it, but it died within an hour of me getting it (I think it might've overheated), and am after something not quite so cheaply made.

I want to stream media to a Mac, a PS3 and a XP / Linux (ubuntu) machine), and I'd ideally like remote access over the web for FTP / SSH and maybe streaming. 500/ 750 GB would be perfect. Not too fussed about RAID.

The Qnap boxes look good, although expensive. Any views, recommendations, avoids?

TIA,
P

I'm using a Qnap 209II and it's the dog's danglies

Streams to the Ps3 and Xbox 360, I haven't tried Web access or any of the other features but so far I'm very impressed. The only issue I have is the backup to an external device feature takes ages to run, but this is apparently being worked on by the developers.

You might get more info over on the Qnap forums.

Thanks graystreet - the 209 looks pretty impressive and would've been my choice from the Qnap product list. Are you running it with one disc, or a RAID set up?

I'm running it with 2x 1Tb Samsung Spinpoints in Raid 1.

I think Raid 1 slows the writng process slightly as it has to write everything twice but it's not too noticeable, it's also a little bit of built in resilience. The drives are nice and quiet and, according to the Qnap's built in SMART monitoring, run at about 35C.

Have you thought about the Popcorn Hour A-100 ?

I have the Thecus N4100+ with 4 x 500Gb Hitachi Deskstar drives....works very well for what I need.

I just wish Apple would support Time Machine on NAS drives !!

Smallnetbuilder have quite a good NAS reviews and NAS performance chart section.

Thanks for the link, dan42 - smallnetbuilder looks like a very useful site. I'll spend some time digesting it before making a call on NAS.

Thanks to the others who posted too - I appreciate it!

P

ive also got an NSLU2 running unslung and its fine but i find it *really* slow to write to, i dont know if the bottleneck is the usb drives or what.

On a kind-of unrelated topic ive been evaluating the linux-based firewall "untangle" - similar product to ip-cop but newer with more features and higher resource requirements - with a view to replacing the firewall functionality of my dg834gt and just running it in modem mode. So far i am impressed with it but i would be more impressed if i could install samba on it to run only on the internal interface and thus use it as a nas drive. then i could get rid of the slug.