Please help me find a good NAS with RAID 1 and 2x1TB, all for under $350 shipped...

[Razor1973]

... or up to $400 for 2x1.5TB. Following this thread, which is more network-related, I am now trying to build my NAS.

I am looking at the D-Link DNS-323 (vs. the DND-321 because of the USB port for extra drives), but the cheapest I can find is $170 at TigerDirect/CompUSA and the cheapest 1TB drive I can find is $110, although I'd rather pay an extra $20 each for the new Barracuda with 1.5TB. So that is:

$170
$130 x 2
= $430 + a few dollars for S&H

This is too much money for me, especially when you see non-RAID 1TB systems go for $140 (Costco's WD My Book, for example), but I do want the large storage and the RAID (the reason I started this to begin with).

Please advise.

 

[Razor1973]

OK, I couldn't wait.

I went to CompUSA and bought the DNS-323 for $185 (there is a $20 mail-in rebate) and two Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB HD's for $140 each (funny, they were listed on their site and TigerDirect's site for $130 up until this morning and now they are not even listed), so my total after taxes and rebate return will be $477. Oh, well.

Anyways, my NAS is up and running and I am currently transferring some data to it from my laptop. It came with firmware 1.03 and I upgraded it to the latest on D-Link's site (1.06), which adds support for 1.5TB drives. I also configured its DDNS and FTP so that I have access to my data from wherever I am. Exciting indeed!

On the HD site, I read a lot of complaints of people saying the drive is very fast but stalls many times and blaming it on the firmware. I also read an official post from Seagate saying they knew about the problem and for people experiencing it to call so that they could send them the new firmware (it's not public, it seems), but I also found the download in several places. I just don't know whether I can upgrade the drives while they are on RAID 1 or I will have to reconfigure the NAS to have them as separate volumes, upgrade firmware and then reconfigure the NAS again (formatting takes about 45 minutes each time!!!), but the answer to that I can probably find in HD specific forums. Unless you know.

TIA