What can I buy?

[yesnomaybe]

I am looking to get a NAS, but I am not going to use it as a media hub or so... it would instead be used as a backup drive. What I'd like to do is to use Crashplans software (or something similar) to mirror the harddrives of the 3 laptops we have at home, i.e. to create backups. It may also be convenient if I could access this backup drive remotely in a convenient way.

I have been looking at various NAS-drives... the advantage with those is that I don't have to build one myself (I know very little about hardware, so is no option) but the downside is that you are probably locked in and forced to use whatever software and functionality it comes with. E.g. I've I stumbled over a review of "Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive, Cloud Edition" when checking out NAS... but it turns out they don't support installation of 3rd party applications, so I will be kind of limited in what I can do with it... and I guess that goes for most NAS-drives that are ready to use straight out of the box.

So is there a possible middle way here, i.e. to buy a NAS-drive that has nothing installed, i.e. that lets me install the OS. I could then perhaps install Ubuntu Server and a VNC server... and whatever else I might need. (please note that I don't want to shell out any significant sums on this... otherwise I could of course just get another PC with decent storage and use that for my backup needs)

Comments?

 

[travisco_nabisco]

Some NAS manufacturers support plugins or apps that run on top of the standard hardware. I would look at the plugins available for Synology or QNAP brand NASes since they are two of the more popular brands around here.

Do you know how much space you will be wanting for backups? This will determine how many drives you need in the NAS, which can greatly affect the price. Do you need the ability to easily expand the capacity by swapping in bigger hard drives at a later date?

 

[yesnomaybe]

Some NAS manufacturers support plugins or apps that run on top of the standard hardware. I would look at the plugins available for Synology or QNAP brand NASes since they are two of the more popular brands around here.

Thanks for this input. I will only need about 1TB and there is really no need to be able to expand...

 

[stevech]

take a look at a Synology single-drive NAS.
(assuming you don't have an always-on windows PC to be the file server)

 

[yesnomaybe]

In case I instead would go for a dedicated PC as my storage device...
I am thinking a cheap netbook with SSD with an external HDD plugged in for the actual storage, but as mentioned earlier, I am not a hardware person, so don't really know which bits are crucial here. What about processor and RAM? If mainly being used to mirror my other computers, how important is processor and RAM? Is there a potential bottleneck situation if I for example go for an Atom processor and 1GB RAM?

 

[stevech]

I have a mini-ITX box for low-AC consumption. It had an Intel Atom (gen-1) motherboard ($50) for some time. Now it has an AMD E350 based Gigabyte motherboard. Much faster, important because I wanted the box's HDMI output to drive the TV set at 1080i, which it does nicely. Zotac and Asus also make nice itty bitty PCs to which you can connect a big disk via eSATA or USB.

Lots of choices if you prefer a PC rather than a NAS. Of course, either can be a simple home file server and DLNA server. Take a look at the NAS features, e.g., use the demo on the web sites of Synology and QNAP. This might help you decide if you'd use those features or if you just want a low cost, low power consumption PC as above.