FluffyKitten

Not 1TB or more like he wanted. And write speeds of 10MB/s or so. The 1TB version of the Stora system is one of the ones I've looked at but not been keen on. IIRC the reason I ruled out the Stora was that it would appear from some posts on the NetGear forums that in order to configure the Storas, you have to connect to them via a Stora website on the internet. I'm tempted by a QNAP TS110 as it looks like it is aimed at people who want a decent low power back up system rather than the likes of the Storas which seem to be focused more on being a media streaming file server. I think the QNAP will be a bit beyond my budget at the moment though. Despite my misgivings, I might just go for something like the Buffalo LinkStation Live just to get a workable backup system in place. Then at some point build a low power PC with FreeNAS or similar to replace it. Thanks for the advice FK

A quick thank you to everybody who's contributed to this thread - my Maxtor DiamondMax is now unbricked In case it's of any interest to anybody, I went with the CA42 cable solution - the one I ordered turned out to have 5 wires (black, white, blue, green and orange) and the USB plug could be opened to reveal a circuit board marked DKU5 but only the GND connection (black wire) was labelled. White and blue were TX and RX (not sure which way round) and to get the cable to work at all, I had to connect the black and orange wires to 2 1.5V batteries. I didn't need to connect up the ground pin on the hard drive. Presumably because I was powering the drive from the PSU in the PC that had the CA42 connected, everything would have had a common ground anyway. I put card under the head connectors, not the motor connectors. I completely removed the screw from above the head connectors and didn't bother attempting to replace it when the card was removed. Seemed like an unnecessary risk to try to get the screw back into the live PCB without it touching something it shouldn't. Initially I tried the final step without power cycling the drive as suggested in Aviko's instructions but this resulted in nothing happening as far as I could tell. After 30 minutes of waiting for a response to appear in hyperterminal, I power cycled the drive, got the prompt back up in hyperterminal and tried the final command again, this time successfully.

Hi, I'm looking for recommendations for a cheap home NAS system, probably a single hard drive system as my budget is quite limited (<£150). Requirements are as follows: low power consumption at least 1TB capacity hard drive that can be replaced easily decent windows XP compatible backup software bundled with the NAS would be nice preferably not a Buffalo system - seen too many failures of Buffalo Terastations at work to want to buy a Buffalo device I'm not concerned about stuff like built in itunes servers, being able to access your files over the internet, wireless access etc.. I just want a reliable box to back up files from my small home network. Thanks in advance, FK