As I discussed in a different thread, I'm about to need a whole lot of home storage for Apple Lossless or FLAC files, so I'm looking at getting some kind of home RAID-5 box. I probably need ~600GB capacity, after formatting and whatnot. The Shuttle XPC solution, at least according to GamePC, only supports three hard drives, but they're probably reserving a slot for an optical drive. If you configure the system with four 250GB Maxtors and no optical drive, the price comes out to $2000, assuming you low-ball the graphics card.

Perhaps more attractive are the standalone NAS boxes. The two interesting choices, at least that I've been able to find are the Buffalo TeraStation and the Infrant ReadyNAS 600. The former comes fully configured for $1000, but people have many complaints. It doesn't support NFS, among other things. The ReadyNAS box costs $1400 with disks, but you can buy it bare-bones for $600 and add the disks yourself (probably another $500).

The NAS boxes seem to beat out the Firewire RAID controllers. You pay more money than the NAS solutions (assuming you want RAID 5), and you seem to get less flexibility.

Thoughts?