Mark Lanctot Wrote: > I guess when you get into the realm of $1K "superNASes" I'm wondering > what the difference between a PC and a NAS is. > > Just get a full-size tower and populate it with 2-4 500 GB disks. Add > a hardware RAID card and with the right software (ClarkConnect or > equivalent) I'm not sure why anyone would want/need a NAS for home > use. > > You can upgrade the RAM and even the CPU. Plus installing SS is much > easier. > > The specs on such a machine would be way ahead of a similarly-priced > NAS. The reason most people buy an NAS is not to function as a general purpose server, even though more and more functionality is being thrown into these consumer oriented NAS. You buy it for the turnkey, nearly instantaneous exansion of you network's storage capacity. No fuss, no muss.
Actually, the Thecus N5200 is selling for virtually the same price as the Infrant ReadyNAS NV. At eAegis (a popular Infrant vendor) the N5200 is just $669 vs. $626 for the NV. http://www.eaegis.com/browse_item_details.asp/Item_ID/834049 Some nice things about the Thecus N5200 (at least on paper): - much faster processor - five vs. four drive capacity - expandable RAID (like the Infrant NV) - built in four port Gbit Ethernet switch, plus the ability to do port failover and aggregation - power management (disk spin-down) - external eSATA port for expansion It really rasises the bar when compared to the Infrant NV. The last one is particularly interesting. Does it mean expansion to six drives, or could it mean even more than six drives are possible? But... I wouldn't want to be the first guy on my block to buy one. I'd hate to have problems... Thecus is a division of the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer Abit. Anyone who's ever tried to get US support for a Taiwanese consumer product may want to think twice about that. They have no forums, so don't expect the instant feedback for problems that you often get from Infrant. And, of course, if the system is closed, as is the Infrant currently, then there will be no way to run SlimServer on it without the close cooperation of Thecus, or else someone doing some hacking of the underlying OS. -- JJZolx Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=25784 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
