So, my birthday's coming up, and I find myself without anything to store data in; my laptop has SSD's, so I only have 128GB there, and my external hard drive broke two months ago, taking all of my nice data with it. So I was originally planning on buying two external hard drives that would be mirrored, so if one died, I'd buy a new one and copy everything over. Then I had another idea: What if I do something altogether more awesome, and find a way to erase that hassle and stream stuff wirelessly to my laptop, instead of lugging around an external hard drive?

I poked around, looked at different thingimagigs, and eventually found this. This is a system with space for two hard drives that runs an OS specialized for data storage. It should be able to wirelessly stream data, allow me to access everything on it, and do some other things I didn't think of like connect to printers, speakers, and external hard drives. This one costs $200; It comes without any drives, yet has room for two. I looked on Newegg, and found these WD Caviar Green 1TB hard drives. Two of these for $62 each, stick them into the nice NAS, arrange them in RAID1 (basically, so that despite there being 2TB of available storage (2x1TB), only 1TB is usable; the 2nd TB is used to make a backup of the 1st TB, in case one of the drives dies), and I'll have a safe way to store all photos, videos, music, and whatever else I want, make backups of my laptop, and access everything wirelessly, and if they release a version of their app for WP7, I'll even be able to do it from my phone.

I also looked at some other offerings; Netgear had something similar, but reviews were significantly worse. Qnap was mentioned by a friend; they seem to have an almost identical range of NAP's to Synology, but their model at the low-end of two drives is $40 more, and they seem less popular (no Wikipedia article!); otherwise, the tech-specs are amazingly similar. I also looked at offerings from WD, Seagate and Buffalo, but their networked drives seemed thoroughly inferior.

Basically, if someone has any problems with what I'm doing or has any recommendations, I'm asking for it, because I just had the idea to do this today and did all of the research in the last few hours. I looked at some web services for backups and such, but Carbonite lacked streaming capability, and everything else was pretty expensive; I believe Amazon charged just about the equal of the number of gigabytes you use per year (so for 1TB, that's $1000/year), Microsoft Skydrive seemed relatively limited and I couldn't even find an "expand storage" button, and other services I thought of were too limited to fulfill all of my wants. It would likely have impressive integration with WP7, but, alas.

I've never been a fan of wireless transfer rates. They are generally poor.

I would recommend getting a couple of these:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/241497

USB 3 is the shit for speedy file transfers, 5.0 gigabytes a second bro, that's what you want. Not shoddy, slow, crappy, wireless transfer... Only requires that your motherboard can cope with USB3, but you can buy an adaptor and luckily USB3 is backwards compatible with USB2, so you can still use the external HD before you get the adaptor/upgrade your mobo.

Also, it's tiny.
3.23 x 4.65 x 0.75 (inches)
which equates to roughly
8cm x 11cm x 2cm

And only 131 dolla dolla bills yo.

Actually, yeah, wireless is terribly slow for transferring files. And, because you've got SSDs in your laptop, you'll actually be able to make a lot of use out of a 1gb ethernet connection.

So you'd want something that has a fast wired connection (1 gig eth, or USB3) for when you're dumping lots of files onto it. But for streaming it back to your laptop, 54 mb wireless (or N, at 600mb) will be sufficient for watching videos etc, as long as you get full signal strength and no interference from phones or other people using the wireless at the same time.

My laptop doesn't have USB 3.0 and I'm not planning on upgrading for at least two more years. According to reviews, this NAS is fairly speedy; reviews say that it supports ~60mbps download to PC and 30 upload. As noted, this is enough for streaming video, which is the most intensive thing I plan on doing. Dumping files will be annoying, but it's a one-time thing.

If that's the case then NAS is probably the way to go then

Just be warned, backing up 1TB of data on a 60/30 mbps transfer ratio is going to take a lonnggg time - especially if you like to keep your backed up files up to date.

The NAS unit itself doesn't really need wireless if your wireless network is run by a wireless router or access point. Preferably you should wire it directly to your network, so wireless clients can use the full speed of the wireless connection rather than only half speed (when going from one wireless client to another through your wireless access point, speeds are halved).

Buy your own enclosure and HDDs and put them together, just as you would with an external HDD. This is the only way to ensure you're getting quality drives. For this, some WD Caviar Greens would probably work nice.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108065
2x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136490

That's the exact same combo I linked to, Ex!

SF, I'm not that worried about that; I'll have the option to store it in two places with good internets. Even wireless-over-wireless won't be a huge problem if it comes to that.

It does have a 1gb ethernet port, and undoubtedly your laptop will too. So when you're dumping files to it, you can just use a crossover network cable between them, and do it that way to get the full 1gb speed. A bit fiddly, but will save you huge amounts of time compared to doing it over wireless.

If you have any spare hardware lying around, chances are it'll be good enough to serve as a basic fileserver. If you're interested, check out FreeNAS. Might save you a good deal of money, and you might end up learning something, too.

I'd looked at FreeNAS; I stuck to Synology, because it's a more integrated solution, and I really don't enjoy messing around with Linux or FreeBSD as much as some might. It arrived, by the way; I have it set up. The web interface is surprisingly robust, almost as fast and responsive as my laptop itself. I transferred all the files over the course of the last three days, it's now set up. Having some troubles configuring the more complex features, but I'm getting there. Already a good file-server.