Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
The major advantages of my WHS over a NAS unit are;
1) drive expansion -- I have four bays, which are all consolidated to a single big volume in the software. I can add and remove drives at will.
2) per-volume redundancy -- some of my stuff is mirrored across drives, some isn't. Can toggle this on the fly.
3) flexible software -- mine runs Couch Potato, sabnzbd, Sick Beard, for example.
4) can shell onto box and move files locally -- handy for moving 10 gig+ files around on the box without having to pull them down to and back up from a client
5) can put disks in any other computer and read them, so I've a bit more confidence that I can recover if the hardware goes pop
6) much more CPU and RAM grunt -- makes some DLNA transcoding tasks feasible (can your NAS handle 1080p?) and makes big unRAR jobs much faster
7) probably more I've forgotten.
Aha -- as Cras says, be an offsite backup host.
4 and 5 it can do (I'm almost positive 4 isn't an issue with Win7 anyway), it doesn't transcode so 6 is out (although I've not found that to be an issue just yet). It can also run Dropbox with not much fiddling (you just have to go into the shell and wget the installer). I only watch one folder but if I drop a .torrent file into it the NAS will pull it down for me, which is cool.
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Grim... wrote:
I wish Craster had left some girls for the rest of us.