looks like it's now $500 ($750 - $250 VISA Rebate)

Rollins said:What's the point of this exactly? Could you just put together a cheap-o PC for ~$200 and throw in a bunch of $60 1TB drives? You could get 3x as much NAS for the same price.

Is there something I'm missing here?

I have to agree with you on this one. I have always preferred the DYI approach to these setups. I have three major problems with OTS NAS enclosures.

1) If it fails (IE some other failure not related to your hard drives) you are at the mercy of the manafacture to fix it, which usually means you loose your data.

2) Generally they are not cost effective.

3) If you are looking for RAID5 you still need to buy another drive.

You can get 3 x 1TB drives, a RocketRAID 1740 x4 PCIe (or PCI), and a 3x2 Hot Swap caddy ,for approx $400 with another $20-$50 off in MIR. Much more cost effective if you have spare motherboard and proc lying around. This was my approach and I slapped this setup in a inexpensive rack case, installed WHS, and never looked back. Performace is awsome.

If you are looking for a SFF w/ low power mode and have no spare parts, I just put together a system similar to the one above with a 45w Sempron Proc, Micro ATX mobo, nearly silent PSU, case, 2 GB RAM, and 4-Bay hot swap caddy for $625 - $65 MIR. Keep in mind this has 3 drives not 2.

Also while I agree with the above posts regarding RAID 5 is not enough, hard drive failures are the most common reason for data loss. RAID 5 minimizes this potential, especially when you are talking about TB's of media data that is difficult to backup. The nice thing about RAID setups with WHS is that you can slap Carbonite on it, and back up your mission critical data offsite, any time. Currently I have about 400gb of stuff (family pics, office docs, accounting and taxes, etc) backed up via Carbonite and I 'share' my media with a friend who has a similar setup. This means that at given point I can recover all my mission critical data, and get back most of my media (to within about 6 months) even in the event of a catastrophic loss.