[bojangles]

For the last several years, I've been using two souped-up B&W G3s to run my home network. The first is a standard network server; the second is our "iServer," which stores all our iPhotos, iTunes, etc.. Recently, I've been having considerable trouble with the latter and have decided it's about time to finally retire the pair in favor of a new Mac mini with Lion Server. The problem? Storage.

The iServer is currently sporting a pair of 1.5TB drives in a mirrored RAID, backed up to a 1.5TB Firewire drive and a second drive off site. (I care about my irreplaceable photos, if nothing else.) The wireless performance, however, is pretty abysmal. I'm sure a lot of that is the inherent speed limitations of wireless, but part of it has also got to be the aged server they're in. As such, I'm strongly considering moving the RAID into a two-bay gigabit NAS so I'm no longer stuck worrying about a particular machine hosting. (This will also allow me a little more time to save up for the mini.)

So I guess my question is really twofold: first, is there a particular NAS enclosure you would recommend, preferably one that would allow me to swap in my current RAID without reformatting? And second, is this even the best solution? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you!

[Waragainstsleep]

I don't know of any NAS boxes that wouldn't require a reformat. Actually every RAID box comes with a list a supported drives. This is often just the list of drives the manufacturer has tested with and any drives should work but the manufacturer will often only support their approved disks.
It sounds like a con, but there are legit reasons for them doing this. Many RAID units will only approve RAID/Enterprise class drives which are considerably more expensive than desktop class ones.

I like the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ units myself since they officially support the cheap WD 20EARS 2TB green drives. Sadly they like their disks formatted as XFS not HFS+ though I suspect you will find that to be the case with most NAS units.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by bojangles 

So I guess my question is really twofold: first, is there a particular NAS enclosure you would recommend, preferably one that would allow me to swap in my current RAID without reformatting?

Not gonna happen.

I've been happy with QNAP NAS devices, something like the TS-219P+ would fit your needs.