I am talking NAS with my it guy right now. His take is this:
Go with a netgear like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822122062
Stay away from Maxtor or Seagate drives...they have a high failure rate. Go Western Digital Black, not green or blue...those are slower.
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Back to my take. I have heard they are easier to VPN than a standard drive, a lot of them have the software built in. I will be setting up the exact same drive at the house in case of a major catastrophe. This way I will have everything...including the video from my fancy new camera system.
What I build in a linux box is essentially a NAS for most clients... but one that runs RAID1 usually (for me RAID 5), it also has LOTS of abilities for scripting and other various tasks. You can make it do just about anything but isn't just plug and play by any means.
As far as hard drive brands... meh, there are two major players Seagate and Western Digital (Maxtor is owned by Seagate).... also there is Samsung and Hitatchi but they are more dominate in the Laptop market (and the DeskStar has been dubbed the DeathStar as it is junk). Being that... I really doubt Seagate has a higher failure rate than WD. Sure in some people's experience that is likely true, but in some people's experience the other is likely true. I personally liked Seagate better due to the fact that they had a 5 year warranty vs 3 year warranty. But I don't like their warranty policy. If you want advance replacement (they mail you out a drive and you have 25 days to send in your old one... sometimes a drive isn't really dead but failing or you just want that replacement ASAP for a RAID) they charge you $10 bucks, non-refundable. WD doesn't do that. I've also heard, but not verified, that Seagate dropped their warranty to 3 years as well.
I buy between Seagate and WD mostly on price. If there is enough money to be saved that it out weighs the warranty BS risks, then I'll buy a Seagate without any hesitation and I'm pretty sure I'm in the top 5 on this site in how many hard drives we've bought/maintained over the course of our careers.
The old Seagate VS WD debate goes on in nerd circles all the time and I find it funny that neither side can see that the other side MUST have a valid point or they wouldn't be arguing it so fervently. It's not like a Apple vs PC debate where there are many variables to the argument, it's always cut and dry (X brand works and Y brand doesn't and vice versa). Obviously both sides work enough to create fan boys on both sides. My brother is one of those guys... he HATES Seagates... but I've bet he has had more WD's die on him in the last 10 years than Seagates... basically because he NEVER buys Seagates, so how does he really know they suck?
Now on to Green vs Blue vs Black. No doubt about it, the black drives are definitely better drives. But one does have to look at where the bottle neck will occur. If you are building a NAS then is your network really faster than your Green drive? If not then save the money and get the green drives... that's what I did for my 4 TB server at home (which btw, all the drives checked out ok with diagnostics, so maybe Pierre is right and the raid is the culprit). I know that my drives won't be the slow point of my server... the software raid or the network will be my bottle neck.
VPN wise... it's not magic... it basically connects you like a network through the internet. So if you have a 20mb file that you need to open it will take the time that it will take to transfer that file across the internet from one location to the other to get that file open. My wife uses a remote desktop program to do most of her work from home. She might would work on smaller items at home directly if we had the VPN (it's in the plans
). But for the larger items I'm not sure there is savings to be done, plus her machine here at work is a beast so when it has to do any thinking it's faster for her to remote in and let it do the thinking vs her laptop at home which is VERY underpowered in comparison.
One thing you might look at is something like Drop Box. This keeps EVERYTHING all synced up. This gives you some redundancy/backup (I wouldn't depend on it as my only backup) and it lets you open the files natively at home and then once you save them it shoves it back across the network(s) to update everyone. You can run many clients on it and they can all have mirrors of everything. My buddy does this locally at his shop because of the mac/pc issues. Instead of fighting network shares he just works "locally" on every computer and it pushes out to everyone else when it's done. Still only as fast to update as your network connection from point A to point B but if you don't NEED the update to happy ASAP it's not an issue, it will be there before you can drive there. He often works at home and does artwork and then just calls the shop and says "arts ready" and then they open it locally and do what they need to do (print banner, films whatever).
Was that a long enough post?
