[karajorma]

So last week my Buffalo LS420 NAS started showing a red light on the front. Accessing its interface showed that it says that Disk 2 was full of errors and about to fail. I promptly shut it down and ordered a new hard drive to replace the damaged one. I finally received it yesterday, installed it and left it rebuilding overnight. I woke up to another red light and unresponsive NAS, which I've had to shut down again.

Quite frankly I'm not happy at the prospect of having to spend another week unable to access all the data on my NAS. I want something I can RAID 6 so that I don't have this issue again. I'd already been tempted to buy myself a more powerful NAS and since the one I've got has broken, it seems like a good time to do so. I'm currently looking at the QNAP TS-431+ which seems quite capable. Since I want RAID 6, I'll need 4 drives as a minimum which rules out the two drive solutions (they'd basically put me right back where I am now if there was an error). I don't really need the multimedia properties of the more powerful machines (but I might be able to use other features like virtualisation, etc).

So before I shell out for one, I figured I'd ask on here if anyone has any experience with QNAP or any suggestions for competing products.

[rev_posix]

RAID-6 with a four drive model, which I'm sure you know, is going to take half your capacity for parity, but for anything larger than 1 to 2 tb drives, it's the only sane way to go if you care about your data.

But as you go up in capacity, those appliances tend to get spendy, even before the drives are bought.  Ever looked at building your own?  For the cost of some of those bare units, one could build a proper ECC-based system for NAS use

[karajorma]

I have considered building my own but at the moment I'd rather have something pre-bought and dependable.