What's the best NAS for home usage with Macs?

Please share your experiences and reviews about NAS (Network-Attached Storage) below. In particular, rate their compatibility with Macs, OS X, iTunes, Time Machine, AppleTV, and other Apple-specific tools. The goal is for future users to be able to easily find the best Mac-compatible NAS appliance.

Rules:

• Use a single answer for each NAS (no duplicates, please).
• Vote (up or down) on any NAS you have experience with.

Also welcome: useful reference links, such as this one from xlr8yourmac.com.

Solution 1:

Synology DiskStation

The Synology DSM software has built-in support for Macs including Apple Fileshare Protocol (afp) and Time Machine support. It has an iTunes server in addition to a regular DLNA Media server. As it is Linux based it is easy to configure the NAS to do rsync backups (ssh login).

It has a great web-based desktop-style interface that is very easy to understand and use. The DSM software is constantly being updated and improved.

They have solutions from 2-disk on up to 15-disk. You can find the 4-disk DS411j without drives for less than $400.

Solution 2:

A Mac

My NAS of choice is an old Mac. In my case, I had an old MacBook that wouldn't hold a charge anymore so I rigged up an eSATA connection to my 2TB external drive.

The advantages to using an actual Mac over a true NAS system:

• Uses first-party AFP on HFS for optimal compatibility. In particular, it supports Spotlight and fast file searches (CatSearch), something that other NAS systems cannot do as well: They usually use a Linux system with netatalk and an ext3 file system which, compared to AFP with HFS, are not optimized for the ways a Mac can search. For more technical information on this, see the Find Any File FAQ, What kind of disks do support "fast search"?

Further features to consider:

• Can serve as a Time Machine backup volume (some other NAS can do that as well).
• Works great as an iTunes master library, connected to my Apple TV and my other Macs via Home Sharing.
• Can run a BitTorrent client to download Linux ISOs and Stack Overflow data dumps (some other NAS can do that as well).
• Use built-in screen sharing to control.

Solution 3:

Drobo FS

The Drobo FS is my new favourite NAS. I've run a Netgear ReadyNAS and a PC-based NAS in the past and neither touch the Drobo FS for simplicity, speed and reliability. The ReadyNAS suffered from poor RAID performance, especially on reboots when volumes needed to be scanned. And the power supply in it was really lame. And the PC-based NAS was just a pain to maintain and costly to keep up.

The Drobo FS is super simple to set up. Has very, very good volume build and scanning speeds on startup. Has what has to be the best hot-swapping of any multi-disk unit I've ever seen that was in the sub-$10k range. And performs like a champ while drawing very little power.

I now run an FS for home sharing and an old Drobo hangs off my iMac for audio project data. They are teh awesome.

Solution 4:

Time Capsule

The Time Capsule can be used as a shared drive.

It is also a Wi-Fi router, and is automatically recognized as a backup device for Time Machine.