Domestic SAN/NAS

[Zorba]

I'm currently using a Buffalo Terastation (not the Pro) at home and it's been pretty good. I was thinking of buying a second one as this one is getting full and I believe you can group them together. However, can anyone suggest something better? Needs to be very quiet and RAID5. There are a few nice-to-have features I'd like:

hot swapping of faulty disks
ability to expand the filesystem to fill new disks (eg replace all 4 original hard disks one by one with bigger ones, then have it use the space without a reformat)
Hackable - my Terastation is now successfully flashed etc so it runs Twonkyvision and can download torrents without a PC. This has proved most useful.

Any ideas?

[Chugnut]

Sorry, I can't answer your questions but I have a Terastation too and I just wanted to check something with a fellow user.

Does yours suffer with a sort of oscilating fan noise every three seconds or so? I've read on some forums that a few people seem to have the same problem. Mine's upstairs in a cupboard and when the house is quiet you can hear it every few seconds. If it was in the lounge and you were watching something quiet, it would drive you mad.

[a7awo]

Last year I was deciding what to do about a NAS and in the end I re-claimed an old pc, installed W3K (IIS/FTP), got a second-hand SATA RAID card of ebay (£50), brought 3 x SATA 320gb hard-disk from ebuyer (£45 each) and I haven’t looked back.
Obviously, the best option might be to buy a proper external NAS, lightweight OS with web access, Raid5, and can take up to 5 hot-swappable disks but of course this will set you back £500+.