Recomendations for suitable NAS

[Skiller]

Hi, I'm semi-interested in getting a NAS, I keep flooding my internal HDDs with all my media and figure a NAS would be a great place to keep it all until I get around to backing it up on DVDs and what-not.

Could you please recommend some NAS devices that might suit me?

The features I'd like are as follows:
- BYOD (I like to be able to upgrade/replace drives)
- 2 to 4 drive bays, 2 will probably be plenty though, I'll likely only use 1 to begin with but would like some room to expand a little.
- Support for 1TB drives, 2TB drives would be better though.
- I'd like to be able to treat the drives as separate drives, I'm not interested in using RAID since I don't need redundancy or speed and if one drive fails I at least want the other(s) to still be fine.
- DLNA support, would be nice for my PS3/360 to access media directly from the NAS.
- Reasonable price, got plenty of money but my main need could be addressed by just adding another internal HDD so I'm really only paying for convenience.
- Gigabit would be nice, but doesn't need to actually to use full gigabit bandwidth though, 10-15Megabytes/s should suffice as most of my devices/computers are still 100Mbit, but would be nice to get a little extra speed from my newest computer and the gigabit switch which has been almost exclusively used at 100Mbit.

Performance isn't such a big deal, as long as I could watch SD video from it while copying files either to/from the drive I'll be happy. I also only need to use it on my LAN, so internet related stuff isn't really that important to me, especially since I already have a PC set up as dedicated 24/7 media server and download machine, but it's old and one of the reasons I started looking into NAS devices was that it'd be nice to relieve it of the media serving.

I also just want to confirm that NAS devices are accessible from windows just like any other computer with shared files, specifically by typing "\\[IP or Name]\[File or Directory name]" into the address bar. Probably a stupid question but figure it's better to be safe than sorry

Thanks

Edit:
Should probably add that I was looking at the D-Link DNS-323, seemed to fit my needs quite well from what I could tell, but it looked like it doesn't support DLNA

 

[thiggins]

Synology DS210J. For $200 at Amazon, it'll do everything you want and more and is a much better choice than a DNS-323.

 

[Skiller]

Thanks thiggins . The specs on the DS210J look like it'll be pretty good for what I need, pity it'd look ugly amongst all the sleek black equipment I got, but better to get something that *is* good than something that just *looks* good . I had been looking at it before I originally posted but I must have missed the "Basic" mode amongst the RAID modes listed in it's specs.

 

[Skiller]

*sigh*
After further investigation it turns out the DS210J doesn't support having 2 separate drives, if you have more than one you need to use RAID

So back to the drawing board, are there any other similar NAS units out there? I found the LG N2R1DD2 which would have been great... but they don't make it for Australia (where I live) .

 

[thiggins]

*sigh*
After further investigation it turns out the DS210J doesn't support having 2 separate drives, if you have more than one you need to use RAID

Where does that information come from? The comparison matrix says that the 210j supports Basic mode, which is a volume per drive.

 

[Skiller]

Where does that information come from? The comparison matrix says that the 210j supports Basic mode, which is a volume per drive.

In their user guide page 37 (first page of chapter 4):
Volume Type: Basic
Data Protection: No
HDD #: 1
Description: A Basic volume must be created with one hard drive as an independent unit. When creating a Basic volume, you can select only one hard drive at a time.
Volume Capacity: 1 x (HDD Size)

Though now that I think about it "HDD #" might just be number of HDDs per volume and it supports multiple volumes or something rather than number of HDDs installed and "you can select only one hard drive at a time" could also be per volume rather than globally.

 

[thiggins]

Though now that I think about it "HDD #" might just be number of HDDs per volume and it supports multiple volumes or something rather than number of HDDs installed and "you can select only one hard drive at a time" could also be per volume rather than globally.

That's correct. A basic volume can have only one drive in it. You can have multiple basic volumes.

 

[Skiller]

That's correct. A basic volume can have only one drive in it. You can have multiple basic volumes.

Ahh cool, might pick this up today/tomorrow then