Advice on a NAS hard drive to buy

To be honest there isn't a 'NAS hard drive' - the hard drive is irrelevant, the NAS unit itself is what makes it 'fast' or 'slow'

What i mean is there are different manufacturers of NAS devices - Netgear, QNAP, Synology etc...

I have 2 NAS units that I use(and have used for other clients) - Netgear and QNAP

I've installed as backup units in multiple businesses the Netgear ReadyNAS 2 drive models and never had any issues, different makes of drives in them and no difference I've ever seen

I have the same at home and use as a network storage unit for storing films/data etc...no speed issues

Have a QNAP model as well(8 bay) - again this is a great unit and never had any issues...

Hope some of this helps...

Each manufacturer will have a 'Recommended' or 'Supported Hardware' section on their site to say which drives are compatible - but in general most drives will be...

I rate all NAS devices the same as the prices vary across the board (I mean from manufacturer to manufacturer). If I understand your question very well, I would say the point of failure is not the NAS units themselves but the actual hard drives in them. I would worry more about the transfer speed or processor speed of the NAS drive more.

Use the following as guides
- Support for 3 or more Hard drives at the barest minimum - 5 recommended
- RAID 5 recommended
- Transfer speed / Processor Speed

The above are the core features, but there may be other features like embedded backup utility, itunes support, cloud support etc

I've used a couple of Thecus and Iomega units and just got used to them.

I second smckeown777's recommendation of the Netgear ReadyNAS.

I can specifically NOT recommend any of the Lacie NAS devices. I had the power supply die in one and I ended up having to plug the drives directly into my PC's motherboard and rebuild the RAID in Linux to rescue my data. Should have gone with Netgear.

A NAS is more comparable to a "small computer with a hard disk inside it". Most NAS are small embedded Linux systems.

NAS typically have a small web interface to configure it, and expose the filesystem to users via a number of services:

- NFS  (Linux file sharing)
- SMB (Windows file sharing)
- FTP
- SSH/SCP/SFTP
- iSCSI

etc.

These services typically work the same regardless of what NAS you get, because they are standards compliant services. So long as the NAS is halfway decent and properly implements the promised protocols, it you are using SMB for example, the NAS offers the same functionality as a windows box with a hard drive stuck in it with folder sharing turned on.

Some NAS have extra utilities - proprietary software or services that they run to provide some added value. Things like Cloud sync, backup utilities, iTunes / Time Capsule support etc. I try to not make my purchasing decision on these sorts of added features and try to stick with the core access services above.

However, the more expensive NAS devices generally have more powerful CPUs, more memory, and have more features than the cheaper NAS. This is critically important especially if your NAS is running complicated things like backup utilities, RAID 5, iSCSI etc. - and usually you get exactly what you pay for. The $800 QNAP drive is going to perform better than the $50 Pogo.

You're not going to get 2 or 3 tb nas at that price.

I agree that there is no NEtwork Attached Storage of 2-3 TB for less than $200. I would recommend the Qnap TS-219-PII for about $300 without disk, and then add 2 drives of 2 TB in a Raid0 config. Total cost about $500. Qnap has a smaller model, the QNAP TS-212-US, for under $200, and again you still have to buy the disks (2) to put in it.  You will love the feature set in the Qnap for all kinds of network connections - ftp, web, CIFS, NFS, etc.

What he might possibly think is an ethernet integrated drive is one of the old Ximeta units.  These were essentially USB enclosures which, in addition to a USB port, had an ethernet port...so if you weren't clear on the concept of the difference between the enclosure and the drive, you might think you had an ethernet drive.  See, for example, this product:

http://www.amazon.com/Ximeta-ENCL-1P-Ethernet-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B000E1D36S

I noted you mentioned backup of critical data.

Main idea of NAS of course is an easy way to accomplish network data storage and collaboration even between different operating systems, but unless you're going for single bay NAS, most users use NAS for BACKUP, even they might not have only important files on it (they might use it for streaming as well). Starting from 2-bay NAS systems they all should provide support for RAID 0 and RAID 1. What this basically means is that you can configure NAS to go for security (RAID 1) or speed (RAID 0). Since there is always a network speed limit unless you have at least 4 HDD's going for speed is not a very good idea, even more as if one HDD fails you will loose all data.

Also when talking about NAS a great importance is what type of HDDs you use in it. It is highly advised no to use desktop HDD in such systems due to their construction. Server HDDs are highly advisable, but they are way too expensive. Recently WD introducted Red series of its HDD which are mentioned for use especially in NAS systems and are just a bit more expensive than regular desktop HDDs. The secret behind this lies in TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) - you can read more about it here.

Now when I've made a simple thing complicated and went a bit way to much into details, may I suggest you to reconsider using Cloud storage as another suitable solution? For mentioned amount of data (you mentioned 50GB) you can lease or even get free (not quite 50GB, but this can be achieved too) cloud storage and make all the worries go away. This way all the data will be available to all the clients all the time - the only prerequisite is they need to be connected to Internet. Data can even be encrypted using free tool named BoxCryptor so you don't have to worry about privacy.