A good lower end network hard drive subsystem for your workstation(s)

Well, this is the second NAS (Network Atached Storage) box I've deployed in the past 3 days.  The other was the Linksys/Cisco NAS-200.  I got the NAS-200 first and then decided to 'upgrade' to take advantage of a reportedly faster unit.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

A NAS box is a device that allows the user to deploy one or more hard drives on the Ethernet cabling of a home LAN (or simply plugged into a spare port on the high speed router if all you have is a single PC.

The drive(s) can be 'mapped'into the computer(s) on the LAN so that they appear as hard drives (reported to be network drives) that can be treated as though they were local to the machine.  This increases effective storage and allows users to share files.  No different than sharing files on your windows workstation, but without the power and complexity of a full PC.

I have a total of 7 PCs and a server on my LAN.  To make things more manageable, the 'my documents' directories of all machines are located on the server - but I will soon be taking down the server because it is getting old and is a bit slow and I'll be migrating all this data to my NAS box.

D-Link version of the product is a competent, if boxy implementation that supports two drives, which can each be up to 1.5 terabytes.  Because of drivesize limitations under Windows XP, you would have to set up large drives as separate volumes (or as a single RAID array).

The D-Link and Linksys NAS boxes both offer several options for the formatting of drives in their products - if you have two drives they can be formatted as

1. Separate volumes; 
2. A single large drive;
3. A RAID 0 configuration where both drives have the same data (mirrored), redundancy which is valuable in case of a single drive failure;
4. 'Striped' drives, where the two drives are treated as a single, larger volume, but the data is written, half to one drive and half to the other sort of tearing the data apart in the middle - this offers increased write speeds because data is 'spread' between the two drives.

Obviously, the large drive options carry the larger risk - if one drive fails you will lose ALL of your data from both drives.  If you choose to set drives up as separate volumes you would lose only the data on the failed drive.  If you elect to mirror the drives, then depending on the nature of your failure you will be able to recover from it - but note that the drives are NOT 'hot pluggable', so the unit would have to be powered down for the drive replacement.

Note that even with RAID cofigurations, there are failure modes that can and will take out all drives, so backing up is important.  To this end, bith the D-Link and Linksys boxes come with backup software, though it is generally intended to copy data from workstations TO the NAS box.  I have not tested this feature on either of the units.

Installation is quite simple;

Unpack the unit
Remove the front cover
Insert your SATA hard drive(s)
Plug power and Ethernet cables in
Insert the supplied CD and follow the instructions

Once that's done, you have a new drive on your computer (in my case, drive 'W", because I have a VPN connection and several local and network virtual drives.

In operation, the D-Link does not really feel to be the claimed 3 times faster than the Linksys unit, BUT . . .

1. The construction of the D-Link is fairly primitive, though it leaves lots of room for air circulation and appears to run somewhat cooler than the Linksys

2. Where the Linksys has a 10/100 Ethernet connection, the D-Link has a 100-1000 megabit capability - so if your LAN is 10 megabits you'll be shut out from the D-Link

3. Aside from a temperature sensor with readout (though no error reporting capability) the Linksys has it all over the D-Link in terms of logging, reporting and such

Both devices will spin down their hard drives if there's been no activity, reducing heat and saving power.

Neither device will power on automatically in case of a shutdown.

So which would I choose?  That's a good question; They both work and I happen to be the type of person that plays with things - so I am drawn to the Linksys unit.

However in practice, since the box sits in my furnace room and simply serves files, are al those features more or less necessary that the D-Link's ability to read write files more quickly than the Linksys. . . the practical side of me says to buy the D-Link.

Here is a link to my epinions review of the Linksys device:

http://tinyurl.com/7qylm3