Synology DS106e and Buffalo Link Station Pro

Tom's Hardware The Buffulo STation includes a 250GB upto a 750GB hard drive in it and will support any SATA drive. Compared with the Nexstar LX, it has SATA inside and gigabit ethernet connection. Performance-wise it can be very fast particularly if you have Gigabit Ethernet and set it for jumbo frames, it can get to 17MBps over the Ethernet or 14MBps without Jump frames and with 100Mbps Ethernet it is very fast at 10MBps which is pretty close to the maximum theoretical rate. Pricegrabber and PC Nation shows the prices are:

The imputed bare drives prices use Seagate 7200.10 as proxies. As you can see, the 750GB drive is way too expensive, but the 320GB and the 500GB are good deals at $123 effectively for the enclosure while the 400GB is a really bad buy as is the 250GB version.

Synology, nice but way too expensive

The Synology is nice but it is expensive at $280. Compared with the Vantec Nexstar LX, it is better because:

• It uses SATA drives and can plug in three additional USB 2.0 enclosures or an External SATA drive like the Nexstar 3 to really get a lot of storage.
• It has way more features including a Upnp media server, a mysql database and a web server with php support and a BitTorrent downloader (so the NAS does the BitTorrent download and you don't have to leave your computer on).
• It is more efficient, so it doesn't exactly blaze away compared on a disk in a computer, but on a sequential write, it is pretty good at 8MBps for read and write on 100Mbps Ethernet. On Gigabit Ethernet, it gets a real world 14MBps which isn't bad.
• Underneath it has a Freescale processor and uses Linux internally.

It is hard to get this box in the U.S., but apparently TigerDirect will be carrying it soon according to Synology and of course Newegg which has it for a whopping $230 so good things aren't free.

Many of its competitors can be gotten for $300 including a hard drive.