You made the same point (that it was expensive for not having any drives) in your post; I was just taking that point further as to why the price is perceived as high.

I know there's a certain value in this being a pre-packaged solution, but for me the value is not there. And I think it's an ample warning to an uneducated consumer that this is nothing more than a low-power computer with a factory-built/installed OS and applications.

I know this has been discussed in the comment sections before, but IMO it's not an unworthy discussion, and far more useful than my potential musings on being "first" or whether it can blend Crysis.

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My last words on the matter are that I agree that the comment was not worth a star, but was not worth the punishment of removing a star either.

And I agree with you generally that most anything can be done DIY. These NAS devices are just pretty easily done oneself, more so than other gadgets featured on this site. That's why I've not made the same comment about any other type of gadget on this site, ever.

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For what it is, it actually is pretty affordable. Sure you could build something cheaper, but that is the point of this thing, you don't need to.

This unit is ready to go, just add the drives and go. Plus it takes up less space and I am going to guess less power. I have used FreeNAS and Openfiler before and while they are easy to setup and powerful, it requires a little more effort.

I recently debated between picking up one of these systems or replacing my dying server that was being using as one. With the high prices or limited features of the current ones, I opted to build my own. Had I known about this a couple months ago, I may have gone in another direction and gotten it. I may have actually gone over board with a new i7 system to be my NAS, but I am also going to use it as a workstation and virtual server to virtualize FreeNAS or OpenFiler and "server" to host my domain.

I also like the idea of these barebones NASes since I can then pick out the brand and size of drive I want to use. I try to stick with either WD Black or Seagate (though my 4 in my old NAS have been acting up recently with 2 failing) and getting 5 year warranty. It also may save you overall if you can snag the drives on a deal verses getting the unit with the drives already.

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Gah, though aec007 reminded me of my main complaint with pre-packaged RAID: the incompatibility between controllers. I've read stories of people that used hardware-RAID Promise controllers, had their controller die, and then could not get the array re-built even using a replacement Promise controller of the same model. (This is not a complaint specific to Promise, however. It's general to low-end RAID controllers).

I have used Windows software RAID for many many years on W2K3, and arrays move easily from box-to-box. I've been using md on Linux for a while too and have had no problems migrating arrays. My few experiences with low-end hardware RAID have been miserable, though.

There's always a trade-off between price, ease of use, reliability and performance though.

@Jason Chen: Thanks. :)

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