We've been talking about re-purposing an old computer to be a home server, for easy sharing of cute kid photos, but we decided against it for two reasons. One, building your own server takes a serious amount of time that we would rather spend playing with those cute kids. And two, even putting a small price on our time for building a server and then adding in the energy costs for a year of running an old computer instead of a new NAS just doesn't add up.
(Our uses: cross-platform file sharing especially media like photos, and backup which is why RAID is so attractive.)
So I went through the NAS comparison charts and the reviews, and settled on Synology or Qnap. Daddy convinced me to look at RAID 5, so I went through it again. The bottom line for us, balancing features (how to get on the list), performance (how to make the short list), and price (tie-breaker), is the Synology CS-407 (not 407e) or the Qnap TS-509. Since I don't care between 4 and 5 drives, I figure I'll go for the cheaper 4-bay model. And newegg generally has the best price and certainly good support so that's easy too. Whew. Not cheap, but it's a well-researched decision now.
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