NAS or...... what do you think?

NAS or Acer Aspire Easystore H342 Intel Atom D510 1.66GHZ 2GB 2TB GBLAN 4 Bay Hotswap Windows Home Server.

What do you think… on special this week at NCIX… will that thing be good with the Live Hub ??

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=63089&promoid=1373

 

So did Acer change the name of this product already? No mention of ‘Easy Store’ on the America’s Acer site, they are calling it the RevoCenter and added an A (for Acer?) to the model #.  AH342-U2T2H.  Funny, that they don’t list the product under either Servers (Home Server) or Storage, but rather they lump it under DESKTOPS.

http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/PG.T1B0W.002

I had the same thoughts a few months ago and I went for a Synology NAS (Ds211j with x2 2Tb Samsung drives) and have to say it was the best decision I’ve made.

In hind sight though I wished I had gone for the slightly faster CPU and RAM but it works perfectly (he says touching wood).

Synology makes undeniably fantastic products. I’ve got the DS209 with 2x2TB drives in RAID0, and I’m planning (crossing my fingers for the paycheck) on upgrading to the DS1511+ with 5x3TB drives for a 15TB main PLUS 2 DS510 with another 15TB each for a total of 45TB in RAID0 because I’ve suddenly found out how much space these full-size Bluray rips really take, and I have a few hundred waiting to get ripped (**bleep** of an investment).

The DS209, which is one of the lower models, features rock-solid reliability and amazing speeds. I’ve got 3 units (1xWDTV  Live Hub, 1xLive Plus, and 1x Live throughout the house, and I can have my 42GB HD full quality uncompressed Blu-Ray rip of Avatar playing on all three TV/Live units at the same time, while still being able to rip a bluray directly to the NAS SIMULTANEOUSLY! This thing has massive bandwidth.

I use the DS209 also for backup of my system and important files/documents and miscellania that need to be stored somewhere secure but also need to be accessed by different machines in different places. I’ve even got a special thing set up so that I can watch all my HD bluray movies (currently keeping most of my my rips to 18gb max until I get the new setup) remotely on my Android devices! It’s wild, my entire HD movie library comes with me wherever I go! The Nexus One has data everywhere and is great for short viewing sessions over HSPDA and I tether it to my Motorola Xoom for extended views and when watching with other people. The quality is wonderful (obviously compressed to some extent) but with my high upload speeds at home I lose very little.

This whole post summed up is basically what Yepmop said: It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.

“what do you think?”

It’s hard to answer because you haven’t really specified how you will use it.

Do you want other devices to access this device?

Are you looking for something that will turn OFF completely when not using?

How much storage do you need?

Personally, I just added a 2TB WD Elements USB drive. It turns on and off with the HUB. Now I have a total of 3TB and if I want to share the media on it I can leave the HUB on or in Standby and access from another networked device like a computer or another HUB.

That was $100 and it turns OFF when not need, unlike most NAS devices.