WHS or NAS - whats the benefits?

[grit]

I'm trying to decide if I should get a NAS or keep an old WHS or possibly upgrade to Vail. My two biggest concerns are that initially accessing my NAS results in a ~10s delay. One person mentioned my Western Digital green drives may be the culprit? My other concern is SLOW bare metal restores over wired gigabit, but I was also told that 7MB/s (resulted in an 8 hour restore for 200GB) was normal for gigabit & several small files being transferred.

I use my WHS for automated backup of 2 wireless and 1 wired computer and to file serve for my Sonos music system. In the future, I might like to rip my DVDs and be able to access them from a HTPC. That's about it.

So, are there any advantages or disadvantages (for my purposes here) in a NAS vs a WHS?

(PS - my WHS box is an intel core 2 cpu w/2gb ram, so its not underpowered).

 

[stevech]

I'd convert the WHS machine to XP or WIn 7 and just run shares. And use a good backup program to dupe disk 1 to disk 2, key files. Like SecondCopy.

 

[grit]

What would be the benefit of doing that over WHS?

 

[stevech]

What would be the benefit of doing that over WHS?

WHS is almost impossible to backup the system itself; WHS' drive management is dead-ended by Microsoft. WHS per se will go unsupported soon - dead product at Microsoft, along with Tablet PC OS, Windows Media Center, Windows CE and other tangents.

An always-on Win XP/7 machine with RAID1 and/or something like SecondCopy is simpler to administer, IMO.