Need a NAS recommendation!!!

[wahamler]

I have a few PCs in the house and would like to be able to access music and pics from any. I tried a Western Digital 1TB Ethernet World Book connected into my LinkSys 54g wireless router. I found the response time to be almost unbearable. In reading reviews of the Apple Time Capsule, other users experienced similar results.

What is the best solution with a balance between performance and price?

[tokenuser]

The minute you are accessing a NAS you have dropped your access speed to below that of a your network. 100Mbps is great, but still less than 1/4 of a 480Mbps USB 2.0 connection used locally. By the time you add wireless in, you are down even further.

NAS is a great idea, but you need to maintain realistic expectations of performance.

[gimpbully]

Further on Token's point, to get even a single spindle's native speed, you need at least USB2.0, if not gigabit connectivity. Going over wireless (assuming 802.11g) @ 54Mb/s only gets you ~6MB/s. Even 100Mb/s only gets you to a paltry 12.5MB/s. Assuming a 7.2k rpm drive, you can safely expect around 30MB/s off a single spindle when connected to sata/ata. Looking at all this and noting that very few NAS's will give you a gigabit port, you're just not looking at a performant solution. NASs are intended for cheap, shared capacity. If you're looking for shared performance, look into building a server of your own or spending quite a bit more money.

The minute you are accessing a NAS you have dropped your access speed to below that of a your network. 100Mbps is great, but still less than 1/4 of a 480Mbps USB 2.0 connection used locally. By the time you add wireless in, you are down even further.

NAS is a great idea, but you need to maintain realistic expectations of performance.

[computoman]

I agree to that. Also be careful of some nas'es with specially formated drives. If the hard drive fails in one of those units and the data is valuable, you might spend a fortune haveing someone do recoveryif the contents of the drive is not available elsewhere. I know of several horror stories regarding some of the off the shelf nas'es.

[tehboris]

Look for ones that use EXT3.

[krushgroove]

What about FreeNAS on an old computer? IIRC it supports RAID, just depends on the computer you use as the NAS box

[computoman]

I have used freenas and use it for emergencies. Centos also lets you set up a pretty study raid configuration.