I am considering to get one for home usage, but not decided yet on any product yet.

In particular, rate their compatibility with Macs, OS X, iTunes, Time Machine, AppleTV, and other Apple-specific tools.

The goal is for future users to be able to easily find the best Mac-compatible NAS appliance.

It has an iTunes server in addition to a regular DLNA Media server.

As it is Linux based it is easy to configure the NAS to do rsync backups (ssh login).

You can find the 4-disk DS411j without drives for less than 400.

In particular, it supports Spotlight and fast file searches ( CatSearch ), something that other NAS systems cannot do as well: They usually use a Linux system with netatalk and an ext3 file system which, compared to AFP with HFS, are not optimized for the ways a Mac can search.

For more technical information on this, see the Find Any File FAQ, What kind of disks do support fast search.

In my case I have an old Mac Mini (1.4GHz G4) with 2 x 1TB 2.5 external USB drives.

It runs iTunes as the data source for my AppleTV in the living room and NFSd for dishing out ISO files for my ESX server in my home lab.

But still, putting up a server is useful, as it can do so much more than a NAS.

Ive run a Netgear ReadyNAS and a PC-based NAS in the past and neither touch the Drobo FS for simplicity, speed and reliability.

The ReadyNAS suffered from poor RAID performance, especially on reboots when volumes needed to be scanned.

And the PC-based NAS was just a pain to maintain and costly to keep up.

Has very, very good volume build and scanning speeds on startup.

Has what has to be the best hot-swapping of any multi-disk unit Ive ever seen that was in the sub-10k range.

From out of the box to running in literally 5 minutes, shares and users created.

Uses little power when idle, and little noise (other than the HDs).

For this reason, i dont do this, i use Carbon Copy Cloner to run to a disk image (dmg) every night.

Other iTunes support is available (an iTunesDAAP server called Firefly), but i havent used it.

ZFS has million really cool features like raid management, snapshots etc.

Bulletproof file server with acceptable Samba implementation is not a great turn-key solution for someone wanting the utmost in Mac compatibility.

And honestly, ZFS is the best, what todday you can get in the opensource world (read free).:) With an some additional effort is possible use it as time-machine destination too.

OS X (unfortunately) hasnt nothing comparable with ZFS (yet).

Best Nas Os