NAS question

eryn_kathleen

I would like to buy a 4-bay NAS enclosure. I saw this at Maplin, and thought it seemed like quite a good deal. My understanding is that the box is actually a DAS and a friend who just bought one revealed that hers has only a firewire connection (there appears to be a USB connection on some models, but hers didn't have one).

So my question is, can I set this up as NAS? I was thinking that if I used a firewire to USB converter and plugged it into my wireless router it might work, but I'm not sure about the software side of things. Would I need to run FreeNAS or Samba, or would this idea just not work at all? I tried a google search but didn't really find much.

Incidentally, I'm running XP on a desktop and Vista on a laptop (though I'm thinking about switching to XP on the laptop as well).

totalsolutions

I would stick with Vista. Only buy well known branded units that should work as intended and offer firmware updates as and when. Please dont use firewire to USB converters (why what are you thinking, lets introduce more cabling, slow it down ...make it fail with all my data and get someone to fix it).

Stick with cat5 cabling and look here for an idea netgear

PCW magazine ran reviews a few months ago. I have a netgear.

eryn_kathleen

I would be more inclined to build my own file server than to buy a Netgear, simply due to the costs involved. That's why I thought the Terabox might be an adequate (though obviously not perfect) solution - because it's cheap.

Thanks for your input, though!

legsak1mbo

The Western Digital My Book World is a decent RAID NAS box. Only two drives but the 1TB model can be had for about £125 and you can replace the drives yourself.