I've yet to see a NAS that is better than a windows home server based system, contrary to the OP.

one thing that is for example rather awesome about it: even when you buy a cheap mini-itx atom based board, the gigabit lan delivers true 100MB/s file accesses, something normally no cheap NAS delivers. that, on it's own, lets you use the NAS as if it's a local disk (and a fast one at that).

the backup system is beyond any other in ease of use, and quality. it's a simple just-works-thing, worth so much.

and it's flexible, as it's a full win2003 server. for me, that means hosting my programming projects on the installed visual svn server on it, and having an sql express server installed on it to test projects. for others, that means autoripping of dvds and audio cds to put them into your network, etc. and for even other ones, it means full home automation delivered over it.

anyways, i'd never go back to a NAS, it's just ridiculous crap compared to what whs delivers. the disk-system rocks, too. plug in a disk, and voilà, your storage space just grew. no raiding, no managing, nothing.

i'd really suggest you do a review of it, but use it for a while first, playing and exploring it.

I ended up setting it up this last couple weeks and I like it. Still working on the file sharing aspect, as I need to go through all the ripped mp3's from over the years and get the naming and file info consistent, but just the daily backups alone make me happy.

Totally automagical and the plugin flexibility along with being a full OS under the hood is great. Will be working on integrating it with the Media Center setup (which is already half network based with the HDHomerun anyway) and maybe start getting the DVD collection on the network.

I love watching the hard drive prices plummet daily .

hi there...

I was originally considering Drobo storage device, now I am nearly convinced that I am going to go with an HP EX485 Windows Home Server.

The WHS seems to have the same functionality plus a lot more. Would use this as a backup for photos/video - approx 500GB storage today and growing by about 50GB per month. Would like to use RAID to be able to secure data in case of drive failure and also backup to another external USB drive.

Any reason NOT to get HP WHS?

Yeah, no video out, for starters.

Home brew WHS, is the way to go. It's easy to replace a part if something fails and you can customize the case, storage capacity, whatever.

If something fails on the HP M/S, you have to send it to them and there's no guarantee you get all your data back.

I'm going to be upgrading my WHS this weekend (which unfortunately means reinstalling), to a low powered Athlon X2 system from an AthlonXP burner. I'll let everyone know how it goes.

As far as RAID goes, WHS does not support software based RAID. You could do hardware level, but it is most likely looking for trouble.

What it does on the first disk, there will be a 20GB partition for the system, and the rest will be for storage. You can add additional drives to the system for storage then, and the total storage space is increased--all without using drive letters (at least to the user).
As you keep adding more, it will also use free space on the first physical drive as a landing zone for file transfers. For redundancy, you can enable folder duplication on specific folders, and they will be duplicated over multiple disks. You can also use external drives to backup data.
To replace disks when you have multiple ones, you tell it which drive to remove, it shuffles things about, then when you add a (newer, bigger) one it will start filling it up.
However as mentioned it handles this all "behind the scenes" mostly.

Some of the other benefits so far:
the automated backups. So perfectly awesome I think it's worth it for these alone.
Media sharing obviously;
Centralized point to get remote access to different machines, or files, monitor AV protection, etc;
From the above, plugins add a host of additional features

I've really only scratched the surface on mine so far, slowly incorporating it into things. I just got it maybe a month or so ago--homebrew build personally. Though the HP's have some really nice software with them as well. Check out the reviews of the HPs to see if their software would be something you need/want.