NAS troubles

I have been trying to find a solution to problem in my home IT world. I want a server, but not a server. Something that will always serve content and be a central storage area. I don't want a server because they are traditionally loud and expensive and power hungry, which means I would have to pay more for power every month. What to do?

I bought 2 500 GB hard drives and a Galaxy RAID-Pro NAS system. It had some cool features like it was stylish, small, fairly quiet and didn't eat up much power. It also had a Bit Torrent feature where you can download a torrent file without having your computer on...it would download everything to the NAS itself. I also bought it because it held 2 drives in RAID 0 or 1. I definately needed something that can be easily backed up and mirroring with RAID 1 was a great option. So where did this all go wrong?

Well the Galaxy NAS advertised that its speed was at 1 Gbps...and in reality it was definately slower...it only transfered at like 30 MB/s...which is TERRIBLE if you have a lot of stuff. Also, the web interface was very basic and crashed frequently, which made things a lot more annoying. The biggest turn off was the fact that playing video from the NAS was so slow that the video was pausing very frequently making it unwatchable.

I returned it. That thing was very inconvenient and getting my stuff OFF of the drives was somewhat challenging since the filesystem was EXT2, which no OS uses anymore except Linux...which I only have as a virtual machine...and didn't work. So I used the Ubuntu LiveCD to get everything off and that worked great. Lesson learned: don't buy cheap stuff when it comes to technology...you will be disappointed.

I bought a Buffalo TeraStation Live instead. It was considerably more money *cough* $450 *cough* but it seems to be working very well. Unlike the Galaxy, this thing is much faster and offers a lot more features. The web access feature is very nice, allowing me to access my NAS from anywhere on the internet. It also allows me to stream music!