Sure, you can build your own NAS, but if you want an easy-button solution that has a lot of flexibility, have a look at the new Thecus N5810 Pro. It's a linux storage server with 5 gigabit ethernet ports, and a built-in battery backup. The built-in battery backup solves the Linux MD raid write hole.
Your new NAS can torrent on its own, be your OwnCloud host and more (owncloud is a self-hosted DropBox replacement).
The new unit is faster and quieter than last generation, now also with some new features.
If you want a home server, and don't necessarily want to build it on your own, then you should take a good look at the Thecus N5810 Pro. It runs linux, and has a lot of plugins that will allow you to add a lot of packages to it including Plex media server, Drupal/Wordpress, Dropbox, S3, uTorrent, etc.
It also comes with Acronis Snapshot software which will allow you to snapshot client PCs on your LAN to the NAS and restore them in the event of failure.
While it can be a media server with HDMI out, we also used this as a media server with Plex and our Arch Linux ASRock Beebox:
Damn this thing is expensive, almost begging me to build my own instead.
The built in power protection is quite nice, I like seeing that.
5 gigabit ports, that's pretty great
Only 4 gigs of ram? That's a little disappointing..
Eww McAfee
The baytrail CPU seems a little weak?
Question, it has full snapshot backup but can you setup a differential backup as well? Or is it only full? The hardware seems a bit weak to me, especially for a NAS at this price point, but if it gets the job done I guess it's fine? Seems the price is more from the software rather than the hardware.
you can prettymuch do whatever you want. the snapshots can be copy-on-write if you want (lvm I think, btrfs for sure). It seems to work, and I like the upgreadable ram. You'd really only hit a ram limit if you install a ton of plugins and chew up all the system ram. I may tinker with ZFS on Linux on this after an 8gb upgrade.
Yeah, the ram upgrade is pretty much mandatory, for what most users on the forum would use it for anyway (plex, owncloud, backups, networkdrives, ect). Wouldn't changing the file system on a preconfigured box be pretty tricky?
The ability to make system snapshots sounds really useful.
As much as I love it, and found the video interesting to watch, the system is kinda out of my price range - but I'm definitely going to look into taking snapshots of my PCs on my existing bodge job NAS
Ludicrously expensive. Bay trail and 2 gigs of RAM for $2,141? Why would anyone buy this? I would rather build my own, better one, for much cheaper. The 5 LAN ports are great, though. Also a built in UPS is a nice touch. I know UPS units can be expensive.
Wow crazy expensive, i need something like this so i think i will build my own, one question though if i build my own would a friend of mine who lives in another house be able to connect to it, download, upload files? We are working on a project and right now we use google drive but i would prefer using our own storage.
Could we get a more in-depth FreeNAS guide? I would personally like to build something for myself but the information around is very scarce. I remember a video where you talked about an octo-core CPU that could handle transcoding to 5 tablets at the same time, however everyone won't go that crazy and might be looking for something a little more modest.
For a small business that needs easy setup and little to no maintenance...this is ideal. Especially when they don't have the knowledge or ability to build their own freenas style system.
As to your question; I don't see why not. Forward a few ports, set up a couple of rules and you should be golden. However I would heavily restrict the access to just a single folder. No sense in giving the world access to your NAS and by extension your network.
The problem is we cant afford this much our budget is around 300-400 dollars, just wondering if buying a cheaper one would be better than trying to build our own
Most likely. Since building your own can get just as pricey. The octacore ARock board that Wendell used is NASfiratu(sp) goes for at least $350US right now. So a cheaper ready made system would be ideal.
No, because the OS is on a tiny internal flash drive. You can do whatever you like to the volume. It's super handy actually. Plex fits in 4gb fine if you dont have a FS with a lot of overhead. it seemed fine w/1080p and streaming to the beebox at 4k was fine (but I assume plex was not transcoding 4k)
Hm, I think I need to review the differences in the file systems. I'm confusing myself. I also keep defaulting to this NAS running FreeNAS, which likes ram. I guess this specific software/ OS is a lot easier on RAM.