I need a NAS that's as dumb as possible...

[Kurgen]

...that is, nothing more complex than a net-accessible unit to house two drives, with identical content, managed manually by me over the net'. I've had some painful nightmares with RAID-controlled mirroring in the past, where syncing goes bananas, or completely loses the plot, with file discrepancies going unreported etc, etc, so I now tolerate the drudgery of sorting the duplication transfers myself.

Basically, I have 2 x 1TB SATAII drives, currently living in a bare-bones net'ed PC, which is too bulky and noisy, hence my current mission. They're already populated with approx 600GB of identical data, and I want to stick 'em into a NAS box, connected to a router (or non-DHCP-served static if poss, as the rest of my net' is currently), and that's it. A dumb file box.

Any recommendations for make, model etc?

Also, I've read that certain (all?) NAS'es use a proprietary file format, i.e. non FAT/32/NTFS? Is this so, and if so, will I have to wipe the drives and start the (laborious) compilation process again?

Phew...

I hope this isn't too much of an ask, considering it's my first post here, but I'm desperate to find a new "home" for my two big boys, before someone accidentally sits a 2KG magnet on top of them.

Thanks in advance,

K.

 

[thiggins]

So you want the NAS to support JBOD, not RAID1, i.e. just want to see each drive?

You might look at the D-Link DNS-321 or 323.

 

[bigclaw]

...that is, nothing more complex than a net-accessible unit to house two drives, with identical content, managed manually by me over the net'. I've had some painful nightmares with RAID-controlled mirroring in the past, where syncing goes bananas, or completely loses the plot, with file discrepancies going unreported etc, etc, so I now tolerate the drudgery of sorting the duplication transfers myself.

You want two separate volumes and will manually sync the contents between the two. Any current-generation NAS would support this.

Also, I've read that certain (all?) NAS'es use a proprietary file format, i.e. non FAT/32/NTFS? Is this so, and if so, will I have to wipe the drives and start the (laborious) compilation process again?

Most off-the-shelf NASes use a variant of the Linux file system such as ext2 or ext3. These are not proprietary file formats; NTFS, on the other hand, IS a proprietary format by Microsoft. If you absolutely need to use NTFS, consider a NAS that uses Windows Home Server. HP has several models, or you can build one yourself.

 

[corndog]

If you don't want RAID1 you could consider UNRAID. It's a bit weird, but It sounds like it will do what you want.

I know I'm going to sound like a broken record pushing Netgear, but with their latest firmware you can configure your Netgear NAS to "scrub" the array on a weekly basis, which re-syncs the array to make sure there are no quiet corruptions happening.