I recommend fans (active cooling) for the hard disks:
- Most Off-the-shelf External USB 3.5" Hard Drives (except possibly: Apricorn, which has a fan, and 2.5" drives) may die from heat after a 3-hour backup session because they have no fan. special fan-cooled cases are available though.
- NAS with fan for the hard drives. It seems drives the size of 500GB or larger in an enclosed box get extremely hot (>170°). This can cause drive failure (happened to someone's Maxtor: external USB hd box, no airholes). commercial electronic components (chips) are rated to only work at absolute maximum 85°C(185°F)! Terabyte drives get even hotter because they have more platters to spin: hitachi 1TB drive is described as "hot, fast, and loud". Some drives like the seagate Terabyte drives run cooler though.
heat can also be the cause of stiction, where on certain mfrs of drives the lubricant on the platter becomes like glue due to the heat and when the head rests on the platter and cools down, it's stuck and the drive won't spin. heat can also cause damage to the electronics. hence...
gigabit ethernet NAS
LaCie 2big Network (2-disk RAID), available from lacie $380-800 (1TB-2TB)
2TB. desktop drive. gigabit ethernet.
LaCie Ethernet Disk, available from lacie $670-1890 (1TB-4TB)
1-4TB. 1U rackmount. gigabit ethernet. spare drive $140-410
LaCie Ethernet Disk RAID, available from lacie $850-2020 (1TB-4TB)
1-4TB. desktop subtower. gigabit ethernet. spare drive $140-410
SNAP NAS Appliance 250GB-84TB, available from snapappliance
this is the real stuff here. desktops, rack mounts & expansion units available. For instance, the 110 can handle 250-750GB disks.
anything other than their low-end products. their low-end products noticeably have no fan!
it seems all they make is NAS products. And they look nice.
Apple TimeCapsule (for Mac), available from stores and apple
available in 500GB and 1TB models. 1 bay.
Vantec Mobile Rack, available from nextag $30+
I am not sure if this is really a NAS or not. it looks like it's a single-bay something-or-other
HP StorageWorks, available from HP
wide range of stuff up to very high-end.
storage server products
open-E DSS (NAS? SAN?) software using iSCSI, available from open-e
openfiler (NAS/SAN) Open Source Storage Appliance Software, available from openfiler, free or buy
requires a PC or server, but you can do a a fair amount with a PC and a full tower Armor Quad Fx case. 6 int. drive bays and a dual-proc AMD socket F workstation motherboard (ASUS L1N64-SLI WS/B), although a HW RAID card would give you speed. I know just the one (Excel spreadsheet) for low-end solution. per-network NFS tuning. enhanced CIFS options. Multiple NIC bonding. Advanced iSCSI setup. This can be an Enterprise cluster package if you want it to buy it that way. PLEASE read description. Turns an x86/64 system into a NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway. Can be deployed as a virtual machine instance. Supports 10Gbps ethernet & Infiniband interconnects. Block level: iSCSI, Fibre channel. File-level: NFS, CIFS, HTTP/DAV, FTP, rsync. RAID 0,1,5,6,10 support.
NAS (Network Attached Storage) server supporting: CIFS/SMB, FTP, NFS, RSYNC, SSH, AFP, Unison, UPnP, Webserver, iSCSI protocols, local and MS AD authentication, SoftRAID (JBOD,0,1,5), disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T, WebGUI. Requires only 32MB on DOM.
[NAS]Freecom Data Tank WLAN 2TB, available from freecom $879
8/29/2009. USB 2.0, FireWire 800 and FireWire 400.
hardware encryption.
2 year warranty and unlimited free helpdesk support.
Win/Mac/Linux.
remote access through web browser and FTP.
RAID 0 or 1.
Network hard drive storage, router, fileserver, USB server, firewall all in one device.