This question comes up so often it should probably have its own forum, and every time it does, comments that focus solely on Slim/Squeeze miss the point of when and why a NAS makes sense. If the only thing of interest to a user is running SqueezeCenter and serving up a few thousand music tracks, a NAS probably isn't really necessary.
But to those who have other things going on in their lives, a NAS can, and often does, make sense. I have yet to see a small, low-power PC that has four (or more) hot-swap drive bays and a footprint of less than 70 square inches (450 square cm). With five full-time PCs in the house, plus occasional come-and-go laptops, a central networked file server that has plenty of capacity and is painlessly expandable makes sense for accessible, redundant storage of data, including massive amounts of not only music, but photos, video, business and financial documents, software, and everything else. It can host nightly backups of all the computers, and then itself be backed up either on- or offsite, weekly (or whatever other schedule is suitable). The fact that it can also do duty as a music server is a side benefit, not its primary function. It's primarily a storage server (hence the name), and when not viewed through the narrow lens of SqueezeCenter-only it can, for some households, be an excellent option. For others, of course, it is completely unnecessary. But just saying "a NAS is stupid" doesn't really do justice to the topic. It's like saying "a pickup truck is stupid" just because you happen to live in a condo in the city. Not everybody has the same needs, interests, skills or experience, and what makes no sense for some might make very good sense for others. -- Dogberry2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dogberry2's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=18883 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=58489 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
