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photon · 09-21-2009, 06:04 PM

The thing with most home NAS you'll be pretty limited with expandability unless you spend more $$. I mean if you go with a 4 bay system and do 2 TB with 3 x 1 TB drives in RAID5, adding the 4th drive will only get you a 50% increase, and then you are done unless you swap out the drives for bigger ones.

To alleviate this you can either get a device with a lot more slots (there are 6 and 8 slot devices out there), or you can get a more expensive device that allows migration to bigger drives without having to rebuild from scratch (http://www.qnap.com/pro_features_RLM.asp).

If you went with a Windows Media server I think the software RAID and drive management has more flexibility in adding storage seamlessly, but I'm not positive about that.

For myself I just resigned myself to having to swap out the drives every few years, so I went with a 2 drive unit and mirrored the drives. I recently went from 320GB to 1.5TB drives.

09-21-2009, 06:04 PM	#2
photon The new goggles also do nothing. Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Calgary Exp:	The thing with most home NAS you'll be pretty limited with expandability unless you spend more $$. I mean if you go with a 4 bay system and do 2 TB with 3 x 1 TB drives in RAID5, adding the 4th drive will only get you a 50% increase, and then you are done unless you swap out the drives for bigger ones. To alleviate this you can either get a device with a lot more slots (there are 6 and 8 slot devices out there), or you can get a more expensive device that allows migration to bigger drives without having to rebuild from scratch (http://www.qnap.com/pro_features_RLM.asp). If you went with a Windows Media server I think the software RAID and drive management has more flexibility in adding storage seamlessly, but I'm not positive about that. For myself I just resigned myself to having to swap out the drives every few years, so I went with a 2 drive unit and mirrored the drives. I recently went from 320GB to 1.5TB drives. __________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.