If you need a print server and external storage device.

[schmosef]

Loud really?

really.

like, really really.

[Helevitia]

$119 is pretty cheap for what you get. If money is an issue, that seems like a good buy. I am personally using the Infrant ReadyNAS NV with 1TB(676MB usable). I can add up to 3TB. Obviously this is a more expensive route, but it is a very robust system. It'll cost you ~$500 just for the device without hardrives. On the plus side, you could add 1 hard drive at a time. I personally added two hard drives and then two more a few months later. It supports RAID 5 but I opted for the proprietary X-RAID since you can add disks anytime without rebuilding the whole thing. You can also add a UPS, USB hard drives and it has a print server. Works with Windows/Linux/Apple. And it supports Jumbo Frames(gives me about a 10% performance boost).

[schmosef]

is it loud?

[Helevitia]

The ReadyNas is sitting 3ft from me and it is barely audible (120mm Fan at 1500-2000rpm). I'm assuming it depends on what kind of hard drives you put in it as well. I have the Seagate ES perpendicular drives. Very quiet.

[DJ]

Infrant was bought by Netgear and it appears that they don't sell them without drives anymore.

[Elie]

Helevitia

Are the perpendicular drives faster in any way, or just higher capacity?

Thanks,
Elie

[Elie]

I bought it...I bought it!!
The Western Digital My book II 1TB, is really nice but as schmosef indicated, it is loud, but the good thing is... it's not as loud as my HP workstation which alone will drown out the noise of 10 Mybooks running at the same time

You can run it in raid 0 or 1, obviously raid 1 will cut your capacity by 50% however provide you with mirroring.
I run it in raid 0, yes I'm taking a risk, I'm wondering if I can upgrade the drives to two 750GB's? hmmmmmm.....

It runs hot after a while, the speed is fast, I have it connected via firewire and have not had any issues, I copied so far 200GB's of critical files (I know I should have run raid 1) and my local drive is much cleaner now.

Formatted you get 950GB, which is pretty good for my needs.

I will buy another when they increase the capacity, or if there is a way to upgrade the drives in this unit.

Cheers,
Elie

[DJ]

Anyone have the NAS version? What transfer rates do you get? Thanks.

[schmosef]

I mentioned my experience with the NAS version earlier in the thread. It's the last post of the previous page.

Another thing I didn't mention about the NAS version is that it locks up if there's too much network activity.

It locked up quite a bit when I tried to use it for bit torrent. WD Support was useless. I eventually figured out that it would lock up less if I set Azureus to not pre-allocate space when starting a new torrent.

[DJ]

So its best to get the USB/firewire version. Anyway of connecting to two computers at the same time?

[schmosef]

I have an HTPC that I have the device hooked up to via USB. I use that HTPC to share it on my home network.