NAS appliance

As we all store our records more and more electronically it seems to be an issue to store the digital content cost effective…

It seems to be a challenge to find a cost effective end use NAS appliance: the hardware is limited to 2 disks of the embedded OS sucks…

An interesting solution could be the products Lime Technology … They are simple NAS appliances that can be built with of the shelf commodity components.

I do like the MD 1500, which has the possibility to hold 15 disks, the OS is booting from a simple USB stick.

The digital home seems to stir up a lot of excitement in the industry looking at the recent announcements from Apple (Apple TV / Apple Timecapsule), Microsoft (Xbox / MS Home NAS) or Playstation III

Game consoles… of course they are a key to lock in the end-user in a platform. They do hold serious value for the vendors once the customer is sold toward a platform the change that he will move towards the competitor is very small combined with the fact that end users lack the knowledge to achieve this and nobody will provide services due to the that the margins are two low… (Wouldn’t be surprised if Apple would announce a game console...)

Open source has something to offer but as always it seems hard to get a simple and transparent solution… FreeNAS seems to be an exciting distribution… I do like NexentaStor: it is a well coded solution that has everything and offers very good reporting.

If u look at the media appliance then Mythtv, LinuxMCE I don’t think they are technology leaders but they do offer some interesting features. It would be nice to combine NAS features and gaming functionally … one box would then fit all ;-)

Still if u think u can by storage capacity with an uptime from almost 24*7*356 for a few $$ that is really interesting...