(Contra-?)recommendations on consumer-grade NAS?

[David Wolfskill]

While I expect that if I really wanted to go through the hassle, I could
build a machine & load it up with (e.g.) FreeNAS, it would be rather a
chore -- and should the slightest thing be perceived ass being not quite
right, I'd need to deal wwith it directly.

Since one of the consumers of the storage would likely be my spouse,
and she'd want to access said storage from the machines she uses --
which include those of the Microsoft persuasion -- I'd need to try to
figure out how to tell if a machine running Microsoft stuff is working
or not.  And I reallly don't even want to think about that.

So I'm thinnking that a consumer-grade, off-thhe-shelf "small" NAS might
be a good way to go.

Any suggestions or recommendations on vendors or products to choose --
or avoid?

I expect (& assume(!)) that they generally have some approach for
allowing Microsoft-based things to use their storage.  But I'd also want
to access said storage from more normal machines (e.g., running
FreeBSD).

At the moment, the main NFS server at home is a SPARCstation 5/170
running Solaris 2.6; while it does the job, the 10Mb/s NIC is a tad
limiting.

And I'm possessed of the belief that these consumer-grade NAS boxen can
be configured to allow for mirrored, hot-swaappable drives, which would
increase peace of mind a bit.

Comments?

Thanks!  I'll summarize if there's interest & something worth
summarizing.

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Depriving a girl or boy of an opportunity for education is evil.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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