Thanks. I needed a new toaster.

I think it needs bigger slits for bagels.

This thing rocks. Prob the best "affordable" (under $500) NAS out there. Great performance.

Not a fan of rebates.

so... what's the drive size limit on this thing? can i put 2 1tb drives? any1?

Yes you can use 1tb drives. I have two of these and getting ready to order a third. I also have the Linksys nas-200 and it sucks, I gave it away. These are the best but the only thing bad about them is the user/group security is horrible and sometimes doesn't work.

thx #6 - i have buffalo linkstation, it sucks too as far as the group/user settings go,

Mine shipped with very outdated firmware. After upgrading, my drives will no longer spin down, and it often becomes unavailable until power cycled. D-Link customer service is worthless and you have to use forums to get any answers. I have a full gigabit network, but data transfers never come close to gigabit speeds. Unless you have SATA drives already, a better buy would be the Western Digital NAS which come with the drive(s)for just a little more than the cost of the bare drives.

#3, #6: what sort of real-world transfer speeds are you seeing on mixed size files? On large (5-15 gig) sized files?

I have the original "gigabyte" Buffalo LinkStation, and it's a remarkably slow turd.

Thanks.

I copied a 14gb vmware .vmdk file to it via CIF (windows) and it said it would take 15 Microsoft minutes (everything gig), which was about right what it took, keep in mind that the wife was watching a movie from it as well and it is in RAID 1 so it has to do double writes. I was able to get my friend to bring the nas-200 that I gave him to my house and we copied the same file to it and it took 45 Microsoft minutes. I know transferring via ftp would be faster but didn't have time to test it. After copying the file to the nas device I tested copying it back and it was considerably faster at about 9-10 Microsoft minutes (wife still watching he movie). So writing is the slow part which makes sense in a RAID 1 environment for such a small device but once you get your data copied it's fast.

I wanted a small device that was redundant and took less power than another computer acting as a file server which stayed on 24/7. These devices turn themselves off after inactivity which is nice. I wanted to get a cheap mini-atx mb with a 1+GHz processor on-board to run freenas on as a test to see if it would be faster than these devices but I have found that for the price I can get the mobo/case etc., it would be cheaper to buy this device so that's why I'm buying a third one.

For what I wanted (which is for storing files) these devices are the best that I have found for the price I wanted to pay.

HTH

Thanks, #10. Very helpful. I think I will order one.