[voip-ninja]

UnRAID development hasn't ever stopped, I have no idea how you could,say that. It's Currently got a beta that allows it to run Xen VMs. I've been running it since it was first released with no issues and the support forum is always active. I've used hot swap bays and cases without problem and have 30TB now with empty bays available. Having seen friends burn up quite a few of those pre-built things I won't touch them unless its from the likes of dell or HP. Being able to buy cheap parts and easily upgrade is nice, I've swapped cases 3 times, mobo 4, and now run it under ESXi in a 3u chassis all without losing any data. That I can use whatever size drives I want is nice but it certainly won't saturate a Gig network nor is that needed for movies. For that I'd do FreeNAS - which I also virtualize for an ESXi datastore :-)

I'm multiple revs back on the NUC bios, I don't do sleep or WoL, is there any advantage to my moving to the new bios? I know they fixed the issue with the EFI and Linux, any other big bugs stomped? I've had zero issues with my MCE remotes etc. and am just curious if I'm missing out on anything by not updating. Glad to see Intel is actively working on the bios!

My, the Haswell thread has gotten quite derailed... time for me to throw my .02 in.

I'm an IT guy, and in my home I had historically operated whatever Win/Linux thing seemed like the best option for storage needs, including home rolled RAID-5 volumes with RAID controllers (to get decent speeds 5+ yrs ago) etc.

However, I just want my storage solution to work and I don't want to screw around with it so I bought a Synology a few yrs ago. I have a DS1511+ and a 2nd bay. I have over 20TB installed and have never had even the slightest hiccup with it. They don't "burn up" and they have quite good resale value if you do need to upgrade to a better one down the line. It's also worth pointing out that the power consumption of the Synology is rather remarkable. With two bays and 7 drives going I'm typically using around 30-35 watts with this thing. If I let it sleep or go into standby late at night it's down to under 10 watts. Try getting that with home rolled solution.

I have now installed three other Synology systems for friends, coworkers and at my wife's business. I haven't had issues with any of them. The time I spend in the typical year "dealing" with the Synology is under 30 minutes and that's usually just version updates. Disk replacement similarly takes just a minute or two.

At the end of the day, my time is flat out not worth building/maintaining my own franken-NAS solution.. and I'm certainly not the only one who feels that way.