A Little Off Code, Computers, Photography and Guns

Acer easyStore vs. My homebrew

If you've read back far enough here you'll remember I was in the process of building my own NAS for media storage and backup. I was recently reading through the RSS feed from engadget and came across the Acer easyStore. While this is a lot more polished in the end than my home-brew NAS box it ended up being a little more expensive as well. The parts I used are as follows:

• Jetway VIA CN700 Mini-ITX $99.99
• Corsair 1GB DDR2 533 $19.99
• Syba IDE-CF adapter $12.99
• A-DATA 2GB CF Card $8.49
• Athena Power 3x3.5" SATA Backplane $61.99
• Apex Mini-ITX Case + 250W PSU $55.99
• Promise SATA II Controller $59.99
• Western Digital Caviar SE16 640GB (QTY:3) $227.96 ($69.99 ea)

Ignoring extraneous things like shipping and sales tax the grand total is $547.39. If you take out the hard drives it was only $319. While the Acer Altos easyStore will be $400 (with one preinstalled 1TB drive). Granted Acer's looks much prettier than mine and depending on the internals it might even have hardware raid where mine doesn't. Though considering it's got Windows Home Server installed i'm doubting very much that it has hardware raid.

When I first started building my NAS box atom processors had only just started to come out let alone be available in mini-itx packages like the one I bought. I could just as easily upgrade the motherboard in mine for somewhere between $80 and $120 which might bring new life to my system, but for what it does now and it's general duties the Via C7 it's got is good enough for me.

I think if I ever decided to get one of the Acer Altos easyStore NAS's I'd just stick an IDE-CF adapter inside (assuming it's got PATA) and load freeNAS onto that and use all 4 bays for storage instead of OS + Storage on the 4th drive.