September 27th, 2007
What's the perfect NAS device? One ZDNet reader comes up with the spec
On very rare occasions do I take a Talkback from a ZDNet reader and elevate it to a blog entry itself. But, in this instance, I felt it was warranted given the nature of the TalkBack itself. Late last night (somewhere near midnight while my Thinkpad’s power charger was literally melting), I posted the first of a bunch of videos that we’re taping while I’m in NYC for Digital Life. One of those was of Iomega’s $349 1 terabyte network attached storage (NAS) StorCenter. In response, ZDNet reader Terry Flores wrote to say he’s got something similar from Maxtor that costs slightly more ($400) and then went on to say that, if he could have it his way, there’d be a different kind of NAS on the market. Here’s what he wrote:
I’m still looking for my “dream” unit, which would combine the best aspects of several units on the market. Between Maxtor, Linksys, D-Link, LaCie; all of them had at least one major flaw somewhere.
Dream NAS unit:
- 2 or 4 bay models, with RAID 0/1 for 2 unit and 0/1/5 for 4 bays
- Gigabit Ethernet interface, with 802.11 b/g/n option
- minimum 2 (4 is better) USB ports with disk and printer support
- HTTP/FTP/uPnP servers
- FAT32 and/or NTFS format support
- email alarming/notification
- firmware upgradeable
- Reasonable performance
- $200 or less for 2-bay model, $350 or less for 4 bay modelSo, who’s going to build it first?
Great question. Maxtor, Iomega, someone else…..any takers?
| 09/27/07
