Monday 1 September 2008

Tech geek royalty

I just love gadgets, and this past month has been particularly good to me. Not only have I made the acquintance of the lovely Nokia e51 phone (black ffs, the silver one looks retarded), but now I am set up with a proper home network.

Been looking at getting a NAS (Network Attached Storage) for a while now and I got the QNAP 209 II Pro (yes, I keep pretending I'm a pro) in the post today. I have to say, from my first hands on experience, that it is just great. 1 hour from opening the box and doing the hardware bits, I am running a multiplatform server, streaming music and video to the mac, pc and the ps3. Maybe it is a sign of having been around the block a few decades when you are surprised when tech stuff just works out of the box, but I can't help smiling on the inside when the NAS showed up in finder (without having to look for it).

Now I can rid the old PC can's four (4) hard drives of precious label master copies and chuck them, along with all the digital music I've bought, on to a 1 TB dead silent samsung drive, available on my wireless home network AND through the net, should I need anything whilst on the road. ACE. The 209 has room for another hard drive and should 2 TB (or 1 TB raided) fill up, it is only a matter of attaching up to 3 USB drives, or drive towers, to the 209. Wicked. Doesn't look half bad either.


2 comments:

EvilKeg said...

I'd defo consider one with RAID NAS... less chance of loosing files :D

Johan Soh said...

Having had this for 2 days now, I would say unless you have TONS of files, go for the 109 II (Pro optional). Only fits one disk but it's fanless which means dead silent. Essentially the same thing as the 209 II when it comes to OS, CPU and RAM. You can hook up a second USB drive to it for RAID capabilities. The 209 is silent, but still about 34-36 dB. Trying to have a silent home as the rest of my life is far from silent... Can't recommend it enough at this point.