As a relative newbie to the world of NAS devices (and HTPC's for that matter - been running XBMC for 2 months), I wanted something that was relatively simple to install and use.
Being swayed [strongly] by the £100 Cashback offer HP are currently running, I went ahead and purchased the HP ProLiant Microserver (N36L) mentioned by the above poster. I would recommend Ebuyer, since thats where I got mine from, as they were a good price and could deliver next day.
Coming in at only £130 (after cashback) made it considerably cheaper than a Synology DS411j, for example. The synology is a great product too and well thought of but can only house 4 discs. The HP box (which is very well put together by the way exceptionally compact) will house 5 drives as standard if you forgo an optical drive, which you don't need for a file server / NAS anyway, as it boots direct from a USB flash drive (straight off the motherboard - eliminating the possibility of it getting accidentally removed). In fact, at a squeeze, you can get 6 drives in if you use one 2.5" drive.
The link below gives an excellent step-by-step account of how to build and configure the HP box, with some excellent photos.
http://www.avforums.com/forums/networki ... d-nas.html
Anyway, I digress. I had read quite a bit about
unRAID a neat little OS for NAS boxes.
unRAID is from a company called Lime Technology and comes in 3 flavours, a basic FREE version which is limited to 3 drives and two paid for (but very reasonable) versions supporting upto 21 drives. Its based on Linux and is very compact. You can run it from a 128MB Flash drive if you so desire.
unRAID has an excellent community and the forums are very active as well as being very informative and helpful. I have never waited more than a few hours to get relpies to my calls for help and assistance. Not that I needed it for setting up
unRAID itself, that was a doddle. The friendliness of the community and the speed of response on the forums shouldn't be overlooked IMHO.
But one of the best things about
unRAID is the plugins you can get for it which allow you to run additional programs, like
SABnzbd,
Couch Potato and
SickBeard, from within
unRaid. In the unlikely event that you don't know what these programs do, they are fully automatic media downloaders. You can also install 'Headphnes' the automatic music downloader, but I haven't got that far with mine yet.
In short I think the
HP mcroserver with
unRAID, SAB ,SB & CP make an excelent little NAS box. Mine sits in the corner of my living room running almost silently 24/7 downloading all my media and streaming HD media to my HTPC without glitches or delays (even over a 10/100 network - I plan to add a Gigabit switch this week).