Still No Perfect Home NAS Solution?

For the past couple of years I have been expecting the likes of Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, Icy Box etc to come out with a reasonably priced 4 drive network attached storage enclosure that actually has what people want in home NAS, it still hasn’t happened yet and it mystifies me as to why, there’s definitely a market for it.

The essential features I would want in the ideal home NAS would be:

•4 SATA drive bays

•Gigabit networking

•RAID 0, 1 & 5 as well as JBOD Support

•FAT, NTFS & EXT2/3 File System

•Friendly user interface

•Supplied without drives!

•Priced below £200, preferably around £150

Any option’s that I can find that even come close to them requirements are above the £300 mark, which is just over priced considering you can pretty much build one for half that using standard desktop PC components and an open source NAS OS such as FreeNAS.