What are my options for a multi-Terabyte home NAS? [closed]

I'd highly recommend a Windows Home Server (WHS) machine, such as a HP MediaSmart Server or Acer EasyStore Aspire. They are an excellent value, reliable, and very flexible (far more than even a ReadyNAS -- you've basically got a Windows 2003 environment to work with). One of these with a set of TB drives would easily fit within your budget.

WHS doesn't do RAID, but does provide configurable (and transparent) data duplication. With WHS, you can also mix and match drives and add/remove them on the fly, as with a Drobo. Honestly, RAID is just a bag of hurt in the home environment.

See a bit more info on the HP MediaSmarts in my answer here.

I agree with Rob that for that much data the consumer-level devices get pretty expensive. It may make the most sense to jam a desktop computer with as many disks as possible since your utility stack probably doesn't have to be particulary robust.

The trade-off with a lot of RAID setups is that as the size of an individual disk grows the much more difficult it becomes to rebuild the array after a drive failure (which WILL occur: plan on it).

So, you could go with a unit with the largest drives possible (2TB?) but rebuilding a 2TB stripe will take AGES -- and as most devices buy disks from the same batch (and failures come in groups) you face a big risk to lose the entire array should a second drive fail while the rebuild is happening.

My recommendation would be to get a unit that offers as many disks as possible and get something along the lines of RAID6 (dual parity drives) to support multiple disk failures.

Since RAID6 is just RAID5 + 1 add'l parity you need a unit that has at least 4 disks.

The only units that do RAID6 that would have enough storage I'm aware of are the Drobo Pro (which I've never used) http://www.drobostore.com/store/drobo/en_US/DisplayCategoryProductListPage/categoryID.14398600 or the ReadyNAS Pro http://shop.buynetgear.com/store/netgear/en_US/DisplayCategoryProductListPage/parentCategoryID.18327200/categoryID.18327600

If you are really serious, you can get the ReadyNAS 3200 which supports up to 12 disks: http://www.readynas.com/?cat=73

The reason why I like the ReadyNAS product line is that they have a really nice set of tools to manage the device (from notifications, backups, remote access, cloud-level backups, 3rd party add ons, etc.) that the rest of the systems don't seem to touch (and DIY certainly won't).

Either way you're looking at MUCH more than a $1,500 price tag. Not to mention, how do you plan on backing up this data? RAID is not a backup!!!!

Many of these answers provide excellent network based storage and many devices are excellent devices, but as any professional system admin worth his salt will tell you...

RAID is not a backup.

It's not, plain and simple. If you plan your network storage like it is, you will be devastatingly disappointed. Especially with multiple terabyte sized drives, a single drive failure and associated rebuild will immediately and brutally read and write to every sector on every drive at least once. This often causes unknown faults to surface on the remaining disks, which trashes your data.

So, consider the options carefully and don't forget that despite RAID's excellent advantages, they should not be considered substitute for a permanent backup. Consider adding an external drive or two, and regularly copy the most critical files off the raid, and into a safe location.

You might want to check out the QNAP range of products - I think these will do exactly what you want in the price range you specify.

Drobo