Hi Everybody

Hope you are all well.

Long long time since I have spoken to you all so a big hello, I was looking for some info and though about my old friends here....

I am looking for a simple NAS unit to have at home to use for file back up (manual drop in files), music storage so my Sonos can pick up and play (given up on streaming from Deezer etc as only end up play music I have already), photos library etc.

I'm happy with a single drive, as most of the info will come from another source so no need to back up the back.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Many thanks and happy Christmas to all of you.

Cheers
Rich

I"m not sure you can get a one drive NAS but I'd be unsurprised if I was wrong. Plenty do two drive NAS boxes you can put one drive in and leave the other slot empty if you want to keep your costs minimal. Synology or QNAP are generally considered to be good options - they both have web based admin interfaces and can be set up by a novice fairly quickly to do the stuff required.

FreeNAs is free (obviously) and can be run on an old 'spare' PC if one is available, but I wouldn't recommend that to someone who is't a bit techy.

I have the synology 214play (superseded now by the 216play)

given my general ignorance of setting up NAS's it has gone surprisingly well

might be a bit more expensive than some but worth it

Synology list the DS115j and DS116 as single drive NAS boxes
QNAP have the TAS-168, TS128 and TS-131 single drive NAS solutions.
Western Digital also have a number of network enabled drive solutions

Alternatively, a fair number of broadband routers will let you plug a hard drive into a USB port and share it over the network if all you want to do is have shared access to a single drive. An external hard drive will almost certainly work out cheaper than a NAS box plus a drive to go in it although I suspect a dedicated NAS box will probably give slightly better performance.

Drives plugged into routers are unlikely to be configurable as DLNA servers for audio/video streaming. Possibly if you have all your music on a Mac/PC already you could look at DLNA streaming software from that.

Really? My router (Netgear WNDR4500) has a media server option for attached USB storage (ReadyDLNA).
I can't say I've used it but I assumed that was what that was for.

Fair enough. I've had various routers that came with various forms of broadband over the years and while some of them have done printers and shared storage, I've not seen one that does DLNA, I've never felt the need to buy a '3rd party' one, it may be more common there then.

Meh, the routers supplied by my ISP tended to be crappy Technicolor ones (no gigabit ethernet and single band wireless) so I swapped it for one that did what I wanted.

Cheers for the feedback chaps.

i did plug a ext hard drive into my router and could see it for storage but not for streaming to my Sonos (as default) so i might look into this a bit more and see if I can get my BT5 hub doing more!!

Rich

I would go with QNAP or Synology. Both are good brands.