[darkpuppet]

That acer box is pretty decent. Though, you should be aware of a couple disadvantages of specialized hardware.

- if anything breaks on it, you'll have trouble repairing it.
- Consumer NAS boxes (anything under $500) don't have the lifespan all that storage space may imply.
- Hot swap capability is nice, but when a drive fails, it's not a bad idea to do a reboot and check the machine over (clean out the dust, etc).

one thing many folks overlook, but you may want to make sure of.
- make sure that it supports SMART notification via e-mail. You need to know exactly when a drive starts to fail. 23 sectors going awol doesn't seam like much until 90,000 disappear on your redundant drive the next day. You get a notification, replace the drive ASAP... in fact, shut the machine down until you do. Granted, I have 4 drives, so it's more likely I'll have multiple failures, but it happens even with fewer drives. Blame consumer-level high-density drives.

I've been running freenas for nearly 3 years now, I've gotten it down pat pretty good too... It doesn't do some of the fancier WHS stuff like differing levels of redundancy, but I can swap out any part, so the ongoing cost of running it is cheaper, and it's infinitely expandable. I could build one for anyone who's interested, but it won't be as cheap as that Acer box, and like I said, it doesn't do all of the WHS stuff either. So you have to weigh the benefits and disadvantages of whatever you're looking for.

I personally love my freenas box, but WHS is nice and simple.

My recommendation: If you have some old hardware kicking around, I'd give Freenas a go, but if not, a consumer NAS is the easier route. Just be aware that nothing is perfect and even NAS servers have bad days.