Another NAS for MASS Storage...

Tech5 and Digital Home Canada are reporting on a new NAS from Iomega, the people that gave us the ZIPDisk.

The 1 TB unit costs $299 and a 2 TB unit will cost $479.  Given the prices of the individual drives, these prices are just too steep.  NewEgg is now selling the Western Digital 1 TB drive for only $130 or less and the 1.5 TB drives are now below $200 in either Canada or the US.  And the 500 GB drives that are in the 1 TB NAS are only $50-$60 a piece.

As a NAS is targeted at general use as well as HTPC duty, I will not discount the cost savings and ease of setup compared to having to build a PC to hold the drives but I no longer have to compare a NAS to only a PC built to be a NAS.  DLink and others are making Do-It-Yourself NAS devices that simply require that you install 1 or two drives in the unit and power it on.  In particular, the DLink DNS-323 sells for between $150 and $180 and is very straight forward to use.

So with that, consider the following:

DLink + one 1 TB drive and you get a price of $280 and you still have the ability to add another drive.  When you add a second 1 TB drive, you are now at only $420.  That is a $60 savings over the 2 TB unit from Iomega.  If you go with the 1.5 TB drives, then you get 50% more storage for a little more than the price of the 2 TB unit.

Given that Iomega should be getting the drives at an even lower price, the prices for an out of the box NAS should be lower than what they are.  And that goes for all of the NAS builders out there.