[clue-tech] Nifty NAS boxes

[Chris N. Brown]

Hey gang,

I was surfing on newegg.com and microcenter.com and noticed that there
are now quite a few fairly inexpensive NAS "appliances" that you just
plug into your network, throw either some ATA or SATA drives into, and
you are off and running.

My home machine is about due for replacement soon, and I was thinking
about one of these.  I've got a LOT of  RAID-based storage on there and
I'm trying to figure out if loading up another big tower is the way to
go, or some sore of NAS solution, and a smaller form factor machine is
more appropriate.  Yeah I know I could prolly build some sort of linux
machine to do this, but hey, I'm thinking of the 'set it, and forget it'
factor here (my apologies to Ronco). The current RAID has a lot of music
and VMware VM's on it, so the music would at least go, not sure about
the VM's.  I have gig-E at the house as well.

Are any of you using one of these lower-cost NAS solutions, and if so,
how's performance?  Any recommendations or suggestions?  Pitfalls and
gotchas?

Thanks....
-Chris