NAS for home AND small business

[rjreilly]

For the home would like to have some redundant protection and filesharing capability. My wife is a mac user so i'm hoping for a device which will support Windows and OSX - primarily for family photos.

For business I would like

1) remote access capability. Guessing my ip is dynamic so assuming I would need would need to install some type if client to ping some type of a dynamic referral service (via a Linksys router running dd-wrt).

2) logon and access control for remote users.

I think 750 gb - 1 tb is probably large enough to accommodate everything - would always like to room to grow but the 4 bay machines are awfully pricy. Considering QNAO Turbo NAS 2 bay at the moment but looking for some advice wrt 4 bay machine

3 bay solutions seem to be few and - those proviled in charts appear somewhat cumbersome.

Thanks in advance.

 

[claykin]

First, pretty much all NAS products will support PC and Mac.

Take a look at the Readynas Duo. It has a built-in Readyshare utility that will allow users to gain access to their shares from outside the network. Its pretty slick, reasonably secure for the average user (I'm a security freak so few remote access tools impress me), and does not require you to reconfigure your router.

Other NAS products may also provide Remote access to data, but I don't know of another product that makes it as easy as the Readynas.

The Duo's bad points are: its slower than the competition, but @ 20MB/s average its usually fine for most users. Its also lacking an eSata port for local backup of NAS data. This annoys me greatly, but it seems that Netgear could care less since none of their products support eSata.

If you are looking for a 4 bay Readynas, Netgear has a few options. The NV+ which is the same performance as the Duo and about $500 with no disks. Then there's the Readynas NVX and NVX Pioneer. Much, much faster, about 60MB/s average but starting at $750 with no disks for the NVX Pioneer.

I like the Readynas products simply because they are well supported and have been very reliable in my experience. That said, remember, even your NAS data needs to be backed up so also plan to purchase external USB disks to backup the NAS data.

Maybe Tim can chime in and make a second recommendation.

 

[thiggins]

For remote access, Buffalo's NASes all support it via the Buffalo NAS portal. No need to mess with dynamic DNS. Look at the TeraStation Duo. Not as many features as the ReadyNAS Duo. But much faster and will meet all your needs and supports Apple Time Machine.