NAS

Placing your digital media collection on a NAS has a number of benefits:

• High availability - Many NASes draw very little power when they are idle, so they can be left permanently switched on.  This means you wont have to wait for computer to boot before you can start streaming music
  
• Protects your digital media files - if the NAS has RAID capability (hard-drive redundancy), you are protected from failure of any one of the drives in your system.  (However, this is not a substitute for a proper back up solution.)
  

Additionally, some NASes are capbable of running a media server.  This relieves your computer of one more task, and increases availability of your audio.

Lacie Ethernet Disk

Summary Compatible with Linn DS products, comes with Twonky Media pre-installed, easy to set-up, no RAID

• No NFS
• No RAID

QNAP TS409 Pro

Excellent competitor to the Netgear ReadyNAS
* Suitable for DS
* Pro version has NFS support, making it suitable for Akurate Music Server system

DLink DNS 323

The DLink is a cheap NAS, with RAID 1 capability.  The drive has limited firmware out of the box, (the pre-installed UPnP server is substandard), but it can be upgraded to run Twonky Media Server.

Installation experience of Twonky is relatively straight-forward if you are prepared to follow the instructions to install "fun_plug", (http://wiki.dns323.info/howto:fun_plug) and the Twonky installation instructions (http://www.twonkyvision.com/Download/TwonkyMedia/TM4Technicians.html)
* 2 disk SATA
* RAID 0,1,JBOD
* Linux ("busybox") based
* DHCP
* pre-installed uPnP server (DLink custom)