Synology and QNAP are similar, but QNAP is a higher quality/functionality and (slightly) higher priced system often found in SMBs.

QNAP has a very active user community that has been helpful for me in the past when I had a crappy Seagate drive fail and then another failed during the RAID 5 rebuild...

Hmmm. I wonder who their sponsors are... I'll stick with Ars.

Put DD-WRT on your router and then you can VPN to your whole network (not just one component).

Some people like computers. Other people like women, friends and leaving their house to be social. Suggesting to people that they build their own linux server is silly. Had the person that much knowledge already, they wouldn't be asking the question here.

As for all of your points about USB, you're still missing things. USB is not NAS. The guy is asking about NAS. Talking about USB is like discussing your favorite toaster when someone asks about a car. There are plenty of NAS units out there that will do RAID built in and you don't have to stay home in your mother's basement on Friday night figuring out how to setup your server.

Personally, I prefer precision and accuracy over brevity, especially if brevity leads to misleading generalizations and outright false statements (like "next to nobody uses [Linux].")

(Also, as an aside I find replying inline to individual points is quicker than keeping track of the whole conversation separately and having to compose something that makes sense without context. Mind you, I don't consider blowing off the substance of a post to attack the poster or his writing style to counting as "making sense without context.")

One can like both, you know -- and indeed, have time for both as well... but then, I can't help but think this is another personal attack, just a bit less direct

It's not hard; just because one doesn't have the knowledge up-front doesn't mean that it's a commitment of more than a few hours (or days at most) for a computer-literate end user to learn it. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but it was worth raising the possibility of doing so for people who haven't thought of it.

These guys would beg to differ:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-007-_-Product
How's that for brevity?

Or spelled out -- the basic idea of NAS doesn't care how the drives are hooked up to the NAS controller. Direct SATA drives inside the box is only one of a couple of ways to do it, and "external USB hooked up to a network box" is still NAS, just a NAS controller (like a NetApp V-series) in front of a fiber-channel SAN is still NAS (just really expensive.)

Sure, as well as ones that don't do RAID. Quality, features, and cost all vary.

More indirect personal attacks. Good grief. :rolleyes:

Since the OP's question has been answered and the thread is veering off topic, I'm closing it. If the OP would like it re-opened, feel free to PM me.