Two years ago, I purchased a Vantec Nexstar LX Network Attached Storage or NAS for several of my systems at home. I added a 160gb drive to the NAS device to store, share and backup documents. The advantage of having a NAS drive over a regular USB-attached drive is that it’s easily available to any computer on the network via several networking protocols mainly HTTP, FTP, Windows Share and Samba for Linux users.
Seagate is now releasing a Linux-based NAS device called the Black Armor NAS 440. It comes with an iTunes server and is also a DLNA-compliant media server. It can be configured to run several RAID formats using RAID 0/1/5/10. It comes with a dual ethernet ports and 4 USB ports. It supports several networking protocols mainly NFS, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, CIFS, Microsoft’s Rally and Active Directory. With 4 drive bays at 2TB capacity each, the device can be configured up to 8TB of storage.
Seagate’s new BlackArmor NAS devices cost $800 (NAS 420 with 2TB), $1,200 (NAS 440 with 4TB), $1,700 (NAS 440 with 6TB), and $2,000 (NAS 440 with 8TB).
Man I have been looking into purchasing a NAS recently as well but $800 is a bit out of my league right now LOL
Have you checked out Frys lately. There are other inexpensive options. 🙂