NAS for use on MAC and Windows

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Kevin
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I'm looking to get a NAS in the near future so i can still do PP on either my Macbook or my PC depending on which is being used by the other half. I definately want a mirrored device or RAID 5 but appreciate RAID 5 could well be out of my price range, which is £250 - £300 all in , budgeting aroun £100 for drives. There are a couple of questions that i have:

1st Which NAS devices would you recommend? I've seen some on ebay which are less expensive than the normally recommended QNAP and Synology devices, and from what i know (which isn't much) appear to have similar specs. I also believe that you get what you pay for! What are the differences between a RAID 1 QNAP/Synology device and this on ebay?

2nd What file format should the drives be formatted to for use on both Windows and Mac?

I'm sure there will be bits that I've missed so I'll try and answer them when it's highlighted.

Thanks

Kev
 
to be honest i wouldnt worry about raid.

mirroring isnt always going to save your data in the event of hardware failure (you should have a 2nd copy of your data stored on a separate device anyway). striping isnt necessarily going to show its full benefit in a NAS (IMO of course).

a DIY NAS enclosure and separate drives will probably be your cheapest option.
 
we went for a really cheap option and it works well, Buffalo NAS with a USB drive plugged into it for back up.

The buffalo linkstation range work very well and are excellent value.
 
i use a drobo.
I believe RAID 5 is the way forward as it uses parity to rebuilt the lost drive. however u can only loose ONE drive. Best thing about is that u can use different size HDD drives.
The new Drobo had firewire built in.
Buffalo are good iswell. however your budget might not stretch that far hoever there are some good deals with drives included.
 
I've got a Netgear readyNAS Duo that works pretty well. Got a pair of Spinpoint 1TB drives in it and it's reasonably fast. The other thing to note is the speed of your router. Not many have gigabit ethernet and may cause a bottleneck. Depends if you're doing large backups or just editing the odd photo here and there.
 
Thanks for your thoughts everyone.

I looked a Drobe, but the network adaptor connects vis USB 2 meaning that it's not gigabit but 480Mbps, so i've struck that off my wish list until it implements USB3 hopefully next year, when it will then run at full gigabit speeds.

I quite like the idea of a Buffalo link station as these come in quite cheap plus a cheap USB external hard drive.

If i was to build my own what would be the best format to have my diss formatted to to use on both a Mac and with Windows and to use large files with both? I have some video files that are 7.5gb it is my understanding that FAT32 won't support this size of file and that NTFS isn't Mac friendly. could someone that knows more than me please point me in right direction.

Thanks

Kev
 
For a NAT they usually run EXT3 internally, and if I was to build one myself, then I would run that.

as for a NAS, you want one with as fast a CPU as possible as this is the limiting factor for many of the cheap NASes. I own a couple of Synology NAS boxes and they work well with the web interface for management (I have Mac, Windows, and Lynux on my network).
 
I have a quad bay NAS at home (up to 2 gb drives)

RAID5

NAS was £200
and the drives were £45 each

Obviously wont protect against fire or the likes, but is decent against a single hdd failure.
 
I have one of these DLink 323 which is a pretty cost effective solution.

It can be a bit slow to spin up at times but otherwise is fine and small enough to tuck away some inconspicuous
 
I have the unit in the ebay link in the first post. I bought the unit and drives separately. The box is in effect a computer running some form of linux. The drives are formatted by the box using commands sent via a web interface. I didn't dig deep enough to see if there are file system options and just let it use the default for striped raid.
There are various media and other servers that can be configured if you want them for streaming media to devices.

I've found the print server unreliable (sometimes does not print) and have gone back having the printer plugged in to a PC. Apart from that it has been fine and just appears on my network as another PC with shared disk space.
 
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