After years of deleting files and buying more harddisk to store all my data I thought about buying a NAS. I think the need of a storage solution in private households has increased enormously after having internet flat rates, digi cams and so on. Buying new harddisks doesn’t solve the problem and buring data on CD or DVD is a rather bad idea because you have to test the burned disc if the data was burned correctly, you have to put them somewhere they don’t get scratched and after some years CD aren’t readable anymore.
Most NAS (Network attached Storage) support RAID and are a good investment for archiving your data or creating a multimedia streaming server. After evaluting the market of NAS I found two interesting NAS products with RAID 5. One was the Terastation from Buffalo and the other one was the Cube Station of Synology. The Terastation needs a lot of power and is noisy and has a realy old version of Samba. The Cube station doesn’t look as cool as the Terastation but you have greate functionality like printing server, web server, database, photo album, streaming capability and lots more. Well, the total costs of the Cube station without any harddisk was equals the total costs of the Terastation with 1 TB already included.
But I decided to buy 4 realy silent harddisk of Samsung in combination with the Cube Station CS-406. The Cube Station-Series looks like an air conditioner, but it’s functionallity is great.
Now I’m calling the my Cube Station NAS A because it’s design remembers to old designs of androids of the 70ies or 80ies 
I feel realy relaxed thinking on working for my diploma thesis. Saving the work on the NAS is quite save. With this RAID server I don’t have to worry about a harddisk crash.
2 comments
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I’m working for the official distributor of Synology products in Switzerland. Glad you’ve made the right decision
Be sure to check out often their website for feature extending firmware upgrades. Like to see WordPress running on a Synology server? See http://diskstation.synology.ch/wordpress/ -
[…] 2 weeks ago, I bought a MacMini. The reason was I wanted to use the MacMini in combination with my new NAS as a Home-Entertainment-Server. The MacMini should stream music and videos from the NAS and display it with the cool feature of Mac OS X Front Row. You have to know that an infrared remote controller comes with the MacMini. My plans were 1 computer for my work and one computer for the personal entertainment. Well, plans tend to be deprecated. My plans changed the first second I started my MacMini. Well, not the first second because to start the MacMini you have to connect a USB keyboard. I had only one with PS2-keyboard. I ran out of the door, forgetting everything around, going to the next keyboard selling store. But thats another story . I’m not realy able to describe how cooool Mac OS X is, you have to experience. Since 1999 I’m working only under Linux and I’m realy happy with Linux. But Mac OS X brings much fun. MacMini is a good combination of a MiniPC and Home-Entertainment-System with FrontRow and the remote controller. Now, I use MacMini for everything expect development. I can’t imagine a better development computer as a Linux machine. To use the MacMini and my computer at the same time, I added a KVM switch. With a KVM switch I only need 1 keyboard, 1 mouse, 1 monitor and 1 speaker. I have to connect them directly to the KVM switch. I only have to press a button on the switch and the devices changes the owner from my MacMini to my computer and vice versa. That quite handy. The KVM switch I’m using was designed for the use with a MacMini and has the same dimensions. […]