Shootout at the NAS Corral

"The computer industry is in a constant state of tension between local and distributed computing. On one extreme is the desktop computer with terabytes of storage, a powerful CPU and GPU, and huge tracts of RAM-but which mostly restricts users to direct local access. On the other end are smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and other thin-client devices that rely on cloud storage and constant data access to make up for their lack of oomph, but which allow users to access their data from anywhere. Both types of computing have their advantages, and both can benefit hugely from a home server or other network-attached storage (NAS) device."

MaximumPC reviewed and rated four (4) NAS configurations, and rated them as follows (barebones cost and rating in parenthesis): Promise SmartStor NS4700 ($850, 7); Synology DS411+II ($700, 8); Buffalo TeraStation Pro Quad ($1200, but with four 1TB drives pre-installed, 5); QNAP TS-459 Pro II ($950, 9).

The QNAP TS-459 Pro II wins easily, followed by the Synology DS411+II. If you need vast amounts of storage, you really can't go wrong with any of the four, although the Buffalo TeraStation Pro Quad suffers from wonky software and bad write performance. An alternative for Windows users is Windows Home Server. I've got a couple portable USB-powered backup drives at 1GB each, and alternate backups between them, so I guess that I've got my own cheap guy equivalent (RAID -1 ?) for a lot less money, but, if you need serious, reliable backup horsepower, then these are some fine options!