Thanks to everyone who has replied so far. The more I think about it it seems that buying a good quality 2 or 4 bay NAS is simply buying a moderately expensive piece of hardware with a very limited purpose, and is not a good value when compared to the Mac Mini solution that I'm also entertaining. which of course offers the convenience of a full computer. to transmit at 1Gb/s speeds is about the price of a Mac Mini? It even seems like the extras that most NAS units offer (mail server, web server, ftp server, media streaming) can all be accomplished on a Mac Mini, and much more.Ī part of me wants to get a NAS, especially since they're a many solutions available now unlike Thunderbolt, but a part of me can't see why I couldn't accomplish this with a Mac Mini solution. Which brings me back to my original question: For a home user that doesn't need the management software of a NAS what can a good-quality 2 or 4 bay NAS offer me that my Mac Mini + Thunderbolt solution can't, especially since it seems like a good-quality NAS with enough CPU, RAM, etc. This is of course assuming that the drives internal to the Thunderbolt units are moderately fast SATA II drives. If I were to share Thunderbolt drives over a Mac Mini then the bottleneck would be Gigabit port on the Mini, which I think would hold true for a NAS as well. If I were to use USB2 or even FW800 external drives, the interface would be the bottleneck. This is why I was thinking that Thunderbolt external drives would work best in this setup. Would the NAS be a better solution or would it be more than I need since I don't need much of the services and management features they provide? Would I be missing out on anything if I go the Mac Mini route? Any advice, things to consider, or comments would help. I'm new to NAS devices in general but I've thought about this as much as I could but I can't come to a decision. Of course the problem is… Thunderbolt drives don't exist YET and I'm not sure how long I'd have to wait for them or what their price would be.

Of course, I would lose the benefits of hardware RAID and my bottleneck would still be Gigabit but at least my investment in Thunderbolt drives would be better than buying USB2 storage. I could get all the apps I want to work fairly easily and have better CPU and RAM. Then the new Mac Mini came out and I started thinking that it would be great to serve the needs as the 'brain' for my storage and media player needs and I could always tack on as many Thunderbolt drives as I need. Also, I'm not sure how easy I could get HandBrake to run on it since everything I managed to find online about getting it to work seemed more complicated than I would have liked. I still don't know if I would have to buy 7200 RPM drives or if 5400 RPM drives would saturate the gigabit link on those models. Those two models seem to be pretty fast (90+MB/s read and write speeds from what I've read) and seem to be able to run Sabnzbd, Couch Potato and SickBeard. My budget is roughly $1,000 (before tax).Īt first I thought about buying a Synology DS710+ or a Synology DS411+II (or even something from QNAP). If I had the Mac Mini I'd just run Plex or XBMC on it. If I had a NAS I'd go with an Apple TV or Western Digital TV Live Hub. I would like to possibly include some media player functionality. At the moment, I could care less about some of the user management features that come with NAS devices since this is for a simple home network. Having it do some Handbrake conversions will be nice. At the minimal I'd like for the solution to run Sabnzbd, Couch Potato, and SickBeard with no problem. I'm currently thinking of 2 drives but something that allows for more drives in the future would be awesome. RAID would be nice (even if it's only software RAID) but I can even live with my current SuperDuper! set up if I went the Mac Mini route. 3TB is a lot of data to lose so I need to make sure I have a way of protecting against drive failure. Firewire 800 seems okay but I see it as an older and eventually dying technology now that Thunderbolt and USB3 are out.

Gigabit over my network seems fast enough for me when I've copied files between two computers (I could care less that I need to be wired). USB2 is slow, especially as I'm starting to save movies and shows in HD. My current set up is two USB2 500GB drives that are mirrored using SuperDuper! and a nightly schedule.

However, after thinking my needs and what I'd really like to get out of it I'm now leaning more towards a new Mac Mini with a few Thunderbolt Drives (when they come out). So I'm running out of space to store my media (movies, shows, photos, music, etc.) and I've been contemplating a NAS.

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