I've seen several nice NAS but they're a bit expensive. The best one I saw looked so bad-ass and had 5 stars. It was 6-bay, but the fucking price on that thing is a staggering 600 USD :/ ... that's just retarded.
It’s retarded unless you know what you’re paying for, and you are actually using those things/features you paid for.
Lol, NAS is a computer?! ... Why can't I just build a fucking computer myself and turn it into a NAS? Wow I'm really dull on this shit. Can I custom build something on my own and have it specifically JUST for HDDs? ...
You sure could. If you’re not picky it’s really easy. You *just* need to learn how to set it up as a server.
Look at this.
Well is this good enough? Or is NAS a whole different ... thing? I don't understand this shit. NAS is a computer? Because I saw "dual-core" and "RAM" and I'm like "wow a fucking thousand dollars for a shit specs because it has 8 bays?" Does it run on some sort of software? Do you install it on your computer and access it through there?
An NAS is essentially a PC designed to do server-things. It has customised firmware to make things really easy, web interfaces all set up, and a custom enclosure meant for convenience.
What do you get for the money? Hotswap bays, dual GbE LAN, HDD status LEDs (and maybe a text LCD), simplicity, convenience, small chassis footprint and low power consumption, firmware support, ... if you're not using most of those, the price obviously won't make sense to you. If you want to use it as a transcoding media server, you probably will want to build your own.
Among the better-reputed brands are Synology, QNAP. New entries include ASUSTOR (as the name suggests, an offshoot of ASUS), more budget-minded entries include Buffalo, and your usual router brands.
The specs may look shit, but remember that you're not using this for games or Photoshop. All those system resources will be used for background processes (e.g. RAID) and system tasks. Do you really want to blow your budget on 8 cores and 8GB RAM just for that?
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I'd suggest you start with any cheap PC you have lying in the basement first, set it up, play around with it, get a feel for what it's like managing a networked server, know what are the things you must have in your server and which are the nice-to-haves. Better than blowing your money on a premium NAS and finding it's not what you want. If you like that case size, Chenbro has
a pretty decent ITX server case, if you can get past the name, if not any case that can handle your desired number of HDDs will do.
Personally, I started with a 4-bay Synology CS-407, liked the interface and convenience but found the 500MHz ARM processor too slow for torrent hashing. A couple of years later, moved to an i3 home server in a Lian Li V354 case, found it overpowered and not at all convenient. Running your own Linux server is fun and exciting etc and you get to do lots of shit, but there’re also nights you spend figuring out how to configure things exactly the way you want them, troubleshooting any samba updates and breakages, etc. I had a web interface set up, then it broke, then I unbroke it again, then it broke again ... chances are you’d be spending a lot of time in a command line, so you better learn to love it (unless you have a spare monitor and keyboard for the server). And unless your case has hotswap, each time you need to do something to your disks, that means mounting/unmounting then in a remote shell, opening up the case to add/remove disks, ... . And of course you have no way of knowing how your disks are doing unless you have email notifications set up, which means more reading ... If that sounds like your cup of tea, this is probably what you want.
Eventually I moved to a 6-bay Asustor AS-606T instead. Pricey? Yes :'| Convenient?
Hell yes. HDD status LEDs especially, if you’re using a bunch of old/cheap drives that don’t necessarily hold up well under 24/7 operation. It took me more than a year to finally decide to go back to an NAS, but I’m glad I did.
YMMV.
