So I'm looking to start using a NAS (largely to get a lot of the movies and anime off my desktop HDD and free up room and to play around with using a NAS with programs like XBMC - which I'm still learning the basics off). I'm in the market for just a simple NAS enclosure at this moment, maybe with 2 to 4 bays and costing under 400 USD (that is not including the price of HDDs, just the device itself). Not picky on brands for what it is since I don't have much of an opinion upon them yet - as for HDDs I'll most likely use a few Western Digital HDDs.
Now I know I'll get the comment just to build one myself and use FreeNAS. There is a few reasons for why I'm choosing not to do that yet. A: I just want to get the content off my desktop as its nearly full. B: I'm in the military and might be moving apartments when my lease is up in a few months so I rather have less stuff to move C: A small enclosure runs off of a lot less power it would seem than having another tower in my room. D: I'd like to get a basic NAS up and running so I can focus more on learning XBMC for a future HTPC machine I'll build when I leave Hawaii and return back to the east coast and be closer to my original home.
As for features and brands, I've already stated I'm partial to all that. Just want something that will allow me to take my movies and anime pull it from my desktop put it on the external enclosure and have the benefits of a RAID like set up in cause of damage loss. I have about 1460 gigs of content at the time of this writing, and in the process of ripping my BD/DVD discs and running handbreak on the content. I'm averaging about a 68GB source directory for say an anime series and ending up with a 12.1GB collection after compressing it. I'd also like to start on a small scale like this so I can learn the basics as I've never really played around with RAID and the best way I learn things is with youtube and to just jump in on a small scale like this of course.