So my girlfriend needs a little more storage capacity for her ThinkPad, plus the ability to access said storage capacity over the network, since she's not always docked on the desktop. I'm thinking that a simple, single-drive NAS enclosure will do the job for us.

I'm looking for something that's got a quiet fan, decent to good throughput, and good cross-platform support, since it will be accessed by both Macs and PCs. Capacity-wise, something in the 250-400GB range will do.

I was thinking about a Buffalo Gigabit LinkStation, but read somewhere that the fan is pretty loud. I thought some people here had one of these units: any comments?

As much as I'd love to get one of those 1TB Enfrant ReadyNAS cubes or set up my spare PowerMac G4 as a full-on file server with some bigger SATA drives, our network storage needs are pretty simple for the moment, and we prefer something that sucks down less power and makes less noise than the G4 does.

Difficult to find NAS that works well with Macs

anonymouse1 Wrote:
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> Difficult to find NAS that works well with Macs


What are you talking about, I know of at least a few setups with Buffalo NAS' that operate in multiplatform organizations (Win XP and OS X). Most that I know of utilize the storage for Adobe Creative Suite files, so their moving some serious file sizes over the network, these aren't Micro$haft word and excel files.

I think I would say anonymouse1's comment only applies to do-it-yourself NAS'.

~A

looking for the same thing myself. Mostly because I'd like to backup and access my files without going to "the computer desk". if I could find a router with USB Print server and USB or FireWire port for an external hard drive that would be perfect... Let me know what you find please. Thanks

I have a Buffalo 250 gig NAS up and running with OS X, OS 9, and XP. Wirelessly and wired. It is quite quiet, not silent, but I can't imagine anyone finding it objectionable.

I love it BUT it did require a bit of setup, which turned out to be super-slick with their XP setup utility. I ended up having to rename lots of Mac files that used unusual characters that the Buffalo NAS file system does not allow--like slashes and commas. I also like the built-in print server, which set up like a charm with 10.4 and XP but required a lot of guesswork with 10.2 and does not work with OS 9.

It is not so good for Photoshop files but for MP3, Word, Excel, and JPG stuff it is just fine.

I meant what tenders said; having a rough day.

IMHO, the cheapest easiest way is to buy a cheap G4 tower, and slap a big firewire drive onto it, formatted for PC (NTFS? FAT32?). Then you've got your USB print server, etc. It's a little big, but versatile.

Yeah, like I said, I already have the G4 tower: the problem is we are looking for a more "lightweight" solution that doesn't suck down as much power or make as much noise as the G4 does.

The G4 is now my girlfriend's second computer and she doesn't get the opportunity to use it as much as she'd like. We may just go ahead and start with that and see how we feel about the noise levels and/or increase in our electric bill.

Could put quieter fans in the G4; info at www.xlr8yourmac.com