Buffalo's TeraStation Pro NAS bumped to 4TB

Check it rippers and thieves, Buffalo is now offering their TeraStation Pro NAS in capacities up to 4TB. That's right, 4,398,046,511,104 bytes which you can carve up to your RAID 1/5/10 delight. It'll cost you ¥378,000 ($3,142) for the ready-made pleasure; pretty steep for those of you with the DIY chops to fashion your own NAS from a quartet of $399 Hitachi 1TB disks.

[Scooter @ May 16th 2007 5:28AM]

please provide deets of these DIY 'chops'. Me want big NAS. Me no have cash.

[Wolf @ May 16th 2007 11:25AM]

Ol' computer with FreeNAS loaded on it

[hn @ May 16th 2007 7:01AM]

You can find detailed instructions on building your own NAS box by googling. Here's a good one:
http://www.pcquest.com/content/enterprise/2007/107020406.asp

[zargon @ May 16th 2007 8:44AM]

It is not hard, all you need is a old computer, even a PII will do. Then you need a bunch of drives and a controller to handle all those drives. I personally like SATA since the drives are more common now, but more importantly the SATA bus is better.

From there, I would use linux. You could either go with software RAID for redundancy or just use LVM. LVM would give you the ability to add harddrives as you need them or can afford them and add them into the LVM with out loosing data, but maintaining a huge drive since it spans across all of them.

Then just run Samba or NFS, depending on your environment to share your NAS with your computers.

If you are hesitant about using linux, check out FreeNAS (based on BSD, but essentially the same thing as linux), it takes care of all the hard work for you and gives you a nice easy interface to setup everything. There are also other linux/BSD distros like this, like NASLite, OpenFiler. Right now FreeNAS seems to one of the most propular and seems to work from my experiance.

[Evil Aardvark @ May 16th 2007 6:41AM]

Don't you mean 4,000,000,000,000 bytes, thanks to the fact that HDD makers call a kilobyte 1000 bytes instead of 1024?

In reality you'll only be seeing it listed as about 3.63TB in the operating system.

[Scooter @ May 16th 2007 11:30AM]

thanks to all for suggestions on DIY approaches. In effect I am running a NAS on an old PC - my PC. It has all the drives attached, and they are on when I need them.

I'd love a slim, energy efficient model like those of Planex with Bittorrent facilities that run when the PCs are all turned off.

hn's link to the PCQuest project is interesting (though I am not sure about the pink rubber gloves!).