What is the best Off the shelf Home / small office NAS

I run a multi OS home environment and am looking for a new NAS as central storage.

OS's in environment: OSX, unbuntu ( linux ), windows XP

Current protocols: smb, nfs, bit-torrent, PNP, ssh

Size requirements: > 1TB ( raid 5 /6 )

I currently run a synology 406 which is fine except it has support for up to 500GB disks and my storage requirements are encroaching on its maximum storage space.

From serverfault i-moan

• Obviously it depends on how many drive slots you need but for personal use I'm a big fan of Thecus's products - I have a 5200pro and as it's *nux-based you can extend its functionality quite heavily, certainly with the protocols you're looking for.

  Jon Skeet : I've got the Thecus N2100 and it's great.
  From Chopper3

• You might want to take a look at DROBO

  They offer a NAS addon. Its not Raid 5 but their own disk mirroring solution. The base version can give you up to 3TB of usable storage if you use 4x1TB disks, and is easy to upgrade plus you dont have to match drives. They also now have a higher end system available its a bit more costly, but takes 8 drives instead of four and allows you do configure a 2 drive failure redundancy (a kind of RAID6) if you wish it.

  i-moan : wonderful! I did not know about this. I wonder if the underlying OS is linux and if its accessible

  Chris : I run a Drobo off of my OS X machine at home, and share the volumes out over the network. It's been rock solid for the last six months. 4 1T drives will give you just about 2.7T usable. If you get the Drobo with the Droboshare NAS add-on (which runs Linux) you can add a bunch of apps including ssh etc..

  i-moan : THANK YOU so much! Since asking I have investigated and found it to be the best option. This month I am about to order the DroboPro 4TB Bundle with (4) Western Digital 1TB Hard Drives DroboPro 4TB Bundle with (4) Western Digital 1TB Hard Drives Thanks
  From Vagnerr

• I'm using a Windows Home Server. While the Management and automated Backup features are only available on Windows, it works like a normal Windows Server for Fileshares, so it speaks CIFS.

  My specific Model is the HP MediaSmart EX470, which has recently been replaced by a newer model.

  i-moan : I hate down voting but this does not match 90% of my requirements.

  Michael Stum : If it doesn't help then feel free to do so, I'm just not sure which requirement it does not meet - it works with Linux, MacOS and Windows, has much more than 1 TB if you want (mine is 4 TB atm), smb/cifs is the standard anyway, you can install bittorrent on it. Only SSH seems to be missing.

  i-moan : I stand corrected. It does do more than I thought.
  From Michael Stum

• Friend of mine is using 2-bay D-Link DNS-323, and he's quite happy with it. There is larger 4-bay version (DNS-343) that would fit your needs. It's OS is μClinux based, so should have everything you need.

  From vartec

• Qnap offers a nice selection of NAS solutions. For example to meet your requirement for RAID 4 you could use QNAP 409

  One of the main reasons I went for QNAP for home NAS was its support of Squeeze Center

  Thoreau : I must second the Qnap. At my office we have the 409U it was cheap, the we threw in 1.5TB Seagates(yes *those* Seagate drives). The Qnap was quick and easy to setup, it comes with loads of features and a very helpful forum and staff.

  i-moan : I knew about QNAP's but info is very useful
  From kristof

• Last time I was in a shared Win-Mac environment, this little Terastation took care of joint file space. Never had the slightest issue with it. The thing kept itself happily cooled, made no noticeable noise, and had more options than I could shake a stick at.

  From Kara Marfia

• I have requirements similar to yours and when I went looking all the solutions I found were either underperforming (ie. too little RAM/cpu to be able to do anything other than serve files) or overpriced. I ended up building a mini-itx system into a bookshelf case with hotswap bays. I chose one of the new dualcore atoms for lowish power and boot from an sdcard in a usb adapter so that the disks are just for storage. I've got plenty of spare cpu and RAM to be able to run mt-daapd to serve out the music subdir as well as other 'internal' apps.

  From pjz