I am taking Legit Reviews advice on the Thecus N4100PRO.

[Dragon_Cooler]

I have been in the market for a while for a NAS, its just been a matter of money. Well I did a lot of overtime at work and have some extra money and despite where it should go, I would like to get a NAS.

I have been looking mainly on these forums for older NAS reviews and so far the review on the Thecus N4100PRO found at http://legitreviews.com/article/888/1/ seems to fit my needs and has a decent price now. It has Hotswapable drives, which is the biggest thing for me, supports 2TB drives and I can find it for sub $400. I currently have 2 1TB WD green drives and at the time of purchase I will get 1 more 1TB drive and build a raid 5. This particular NAS has 4 bays so I can add in a spare when I can get another drive. I looked through the manual and it appears that I can upgrade the drives and raid type fairly easily in the future when I get more money for 2TB drives. All the features are a nice addition, though I really just care about the ability to use SMB for my windows computers.

I did some pricing to build my own NAS. I currently have a AMD X4 965 processor, A case, and a PSU. So all I would need is a backplane with hotswappable drives, Sata raid controller, Mobo, and RAM. What got me started to price out stuff is the hotswap backplane. A lot of the colo Servers at work have these guys:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817995004
and I was affraid that I needed a raid card to support it. Sure enough it needs its own Raid controller which alone was the deal breaker for me. A GOOD raid card will cost ya $250+ that supports raid 5/6/10. Getting the mobo, RAM, backplane came out to be about $300. I figured it was more financially sound to go ahead with the NAS.

So with that all being said, can anyone top me? Can anyone post a better NAS with 4x hotswapable drives for less than $400? I post this to see if my idea on all this is right and if anyone knows something I may not. So far the cheapest I have found the Thecus N4100PRO is for $375.

[bubba]

I have used the N4100PRO since I did the review. Loaded up with four 640GB dirves for storing/playing MP3s and DVD images. Sets on my desk behind me in my office. So quiet I forget the thing is there.

[Dragon_Cooler]

Well I got the NAS in and have pretty much been beating the crap out of it! LOL By that I mean hitting it hard with tasks, Building the raid and copying over 1.5TBs to it. The drives have pretty much been non stop since it has been unpacked. So far I love it! When the final drive comes in it will be interesting to see how the raid and drive migration will do. Amazon didnt ship my third TB drive along with the NAS, so I borrowed a TB drive from work because I was anxious to get all this started. When the drive comes in I will have to replace it with my drive and give this other drive back to work.

Again I am glad for the review here! If anyone is in the market for a NAS this one should be at the top of your list.

Right now I am trying to find a cheap unmanaged gigabit switch that will support 802.3ad (link aggregation) Because I want to try the load balancing. But so far they are $500 +