i´d go for qnap stuff
or some raidsonic icy stuff

other than that, i´d rather buy esata drives, i need speed when shifting gb of imageboards...

http://geizhals.at/eu/a404897.html
no idea how fast those things are, but you could afford like 2 of those, and 2000gb with lan in that price department arent that fast... :|
(usually way below 100mbit)

Had a look at the qnap ones as well. Recommend any particular model?

Not aware of Raidsonic. Will have a look.

I would prefer to stay away from e-SATA as it looks like that connection type isn't going to be around for much long.

Did anyone take a look at these ones?
http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo.php

I've been looking at the http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/linkstation/linkstation-pro-ls-xhl/ but it hasn't been released in the EU.

Radioactive said:
I would prefer to stay away from e-SATA as it looks like that connection type isn't going to be around for much long.

I would beg to differ, sata drives have finally matched (performance wise) scsi drives (even SAS scsi is only 320). There's a lot of new hardware out there that is using the e-sata to hook up to external storage now. The problem you run into with pre-made ext storage is that the media can't be easily integrated back into your computer. One could rip the physical drive out of its case and make it an internal drive, ultimately you're going to just need more and more space.

For the long term you'd ultimately save money spending a bit more upfront, but being able to upgrade as needed. Either get a real server (just find an old Dell on ebay, can get em for under 100 or even less) so that you can add drives as you need more room, or swap em out for bigger ones. Other is to get one of the self contained external backplanes that have the raid controller built in. Just drop in the drives and you're in business.

I ended up buying a Buffalo Linkstation today. It might be poor value for money, but I needed a replacement for my current drive.

I'm getting paranoid about disk failure...

Unless you want to use a tertiary backup drive (chances of 3 disks failing all at once are pretty low) only other option is optical or tape. Even with a blu-ray burner that's only 25gb, and tape drives are extremely expensive.

I've heard from a few people that have had their 1.5 TB (single) drives fail. For a disk they generate an abnormally high amount of heat which ultimately kills them. While its very convenient to have that much storage available, if it fails you're royally screwed.

And that why common peasants should learn about hardware mods such cooling, de-noising etc.

Feito said:
de-noising

Whut?

Argh! Sorry I can't find the word right now (I tried a direct translation >.>)

What I mean is your trying to make your HDD box/station as silent as possible, with it with rubber or I dunno what. I do use rubber thou that lowers the decibel aka noise by probably 50%. Coming up with a decent ventilation system is a nifty idea as well, that way you can keep em below 25°C. I mean some people buy these boxes thinking their HHDs will never burn out, but unfortunately they DO!

If I wanted a nas I would of used freenas or freebsd with zfs for future expandability..