[conspire] external storage recommendation

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Either way, I need to go shopping for some sort of box with at least
> 2 bays for drives and a power supply and a processor board and drives
> and maybe Wi-Fi and ...  Often buying the pieces separately costs
> more than buying a thing all put together.  In my case, I'm more
> interested in the Easy Button since I have enough other electronics
> projects where no ready made box exists.  

As usual, the _first_ question you need to address, before "What do
I buy?" is "What problem am I trying to solve, and why?"

As I mentioned earlier, the simple solution -- and cheaper, and easier
-- to your "How do I do backup of my 1/2 terabyte memory stick, without
getting a different laptop?" is:  buy a pair of large-ish
USB2-connectable external hard drives, and rsync to them both,
alternating.

That has the advantage of being actual _backup_.  For reasons also
mentioned, a NAS isn't actually backup.

There certainly are off-the-shelf NAS units that are _claimed_ to not
entirely suck.  QNAP, Synology, iXsystems, Drobo....

Looking over a sampling of QNAP and Synology units at NewEgg leaves me a
bit underwhelmed, but at a quick glance they don't look dreadful.

The problem you face, as someone seeking to just buy a quick-and-easy
home-office-grade NAS without having to pick and choose what goes into
it, is that it's a category that suffers Moen's Law of Bicycles to a
considerable degree.
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html#moenslaw-bicycles
Which is to say, most of the products are pretty dreadful because far
too many buyers settle for junk and cannot distinguish non-junk when
it's offered.