Dedicated NAS or Desktop For Secure (redundant) Storage?

JoJoCal19

So I've got hundreds of gigs of photos and videos of family stuff which is extremely important to me and I've been looking at ways to back them up outside of my usual Time Machine backup. I've got a 2011 MacBook Pro where everything is stored and I backup to an external 1TB HD, but I wan't more redundancy.

So I've been looking at NAS devices where you can install your own HD's or NAS devices that come with the drives preinstalled. RAID 1 is a must and is non-negotiable. I'm looking at 1TB x2 or 2TBx2.

From what I've seen, the cheaper NAS devices are not great. For example DLink driveless NAS formats the drives in a proprietary format only. No way. Other driveless devices between that $100 price and $200 seem to be marginal at best. The good ones are over $200 with no drives or $300 to $400+ with drives. Also most of the NAS devices have a downside, whether it be proprietary formats, reliability, certain HD brand incompatibility, etc.

So I've been thinking, with the components I already have, I can build a nice Core i5 2500K, 16GB RAM, 1TB x 2 Windows 7 Pro box for under $500. That would serve my purpose and then some. That gives me flexibility to also use the PC for other stuff that I've been having to use a Win VM for.

So do I spend $400 for a dedicated NAS or a little more for a nice desktop that can serve the same purpose and then some? Anyone have experience using either, or both? I don't really see a disadvantage to going the desktop route.

demonfurbie

http://www.amazon.com/NETDISK-DUO-NewFAST-Enclosure-352UN/dp/B004JHXWDC

lets you format the disks like you want

just add hard drives

Everyone

Or build your own NAS with FreeNAS.

MentholMoose

Power consumption will be higher for a desktop than a NAS. Also it will take up more space, be noisier, and require more maintenance (e.g. OS patching) and configuration than a typical NAS. But, there are indeed many advantages.

I have a file server in my home network but a while ago I wanted to add additional storage on the network for backups, so I had to decide between a NAS and a cheap PC. I wanted the flexibility of a PC, but I cared about power, space and noise so I opted to build an Atom-based PC. It works fine, but the slow CPU causes network performance to be not very good (enough for backups, though). I run Linux on it so maintenance and configuration are minimized (for me).