I’ve been looking for some sort of better storage strategy for my home network for some time. To date, anything important I’ve stored on my Macbook Pro.  About once a week I do a Time Machine backup to an external USB drive.  I also do an additional backup of my critical information to an online provider called Mozy.

Right now, I’m running out of hard drive space on the Macbook which has a 160GB drive.  To make matters worse, I bought my wife a new digital camera for Christmas.  It’s a 10MP which as you can guess can chew up a lot of space quickly.

I’ve looked at Buffalo, D-Link, HP, Iomega, Linksys, Maxtor, Netgear, QNAP, and Synology.  My initial goal is simple.  I want at least 1TB of RAID protected network storage for under $500.  I really want to use the new Seagate 1.5TB drives which are $130 even though they have had a bumpy start.  I think that Seagate has identified the problem drives and firmware.  If I could have a bit more, how about being able to mod the box and run some other software?  I want to run a RSYNC solution where I can backup the NAS to my web hosting provider.  That said, I want the backups to be encrypted and automated (scheduled).

From first glance, the Maxtor got terrible reviews as did their “green” drives.  I did not like being locked into the drives being shipped with some enclosures.  That dropped off the Buffalo and HP boxes.  This also put a limit to how much the enclosure should cost, I.E. 500 - (2 * 130) = $240  I liked both the QNAP and Synology boxes but they priced themselves out when you factor in the cost of the drives.

I was actually not interested in the D-Link product line based on my experience with some of their older networking gear.  As I dug around the Internet, the DNS-323 seemed to really perform and has a good following.  I’ve found a thriving community of modders.  I’d love to have more than two bays but I can’t do that and stay under $500.  I know, I could have rolled my own and ran FreeNAS but there is a lot to be said for a small toaster appliance that spins down and goes to sleep drawing almost nothing when it’s not in use.

Well, I’ve taken the plunge and bought the D-Link DNS-323 for $188 and it also has a $30 mail-in rebate.  All said and done, I’ll have 1.5TB of space that’s RAID-1 protected for $418 with the rebate.

I’ll write more once I get it and have some time to really play with it.