Digital Home Thoughts: Backing Up Is Not Hard To Do: Reviewing The Synology DS211+

"Synology is one of the rapidly rising players in the SMB (Small to Medium Businesses) / SOHO (Small Office & Home Office) NAS market. This market is a highly competitive one with many players like QNAP, Thecus, Netgear, Drobo, LaCie, Seagate and Western Digital. Consumers with a necessity to store and backup their home media collection are also amongst the customers in this market."

The way I see it, with Microsoft ceding the SMB and SOHO NAS market to other businesses (Yes, that is what you did when you got rid of Drive Extender, Microsoft.) the market just got much more interesting. While a two-drive system may not seem like a lot at first, keep in mind that three TB drives are becoming more accessible. Unfortunately, while hard drives are cheaper than ever, it seems that the cost of a well performing NAS is not cheap. While power consumption is always a concern, it has often made me wonder, where for the cost of one of these performance NAS devices, you can purchase a low end desktop computer and load it up with NAS software like FreeNAS. Doing so would not be that much more work than setting up something from Synology or Drobo either. Anyone think these are worth the price?