best NAS drive solution for WIn 7?

[lewist57]

My older and cheaper network attached drive (NAS) will not work with Windows 7, but works fine with an XP machine on my home network. There are several tweaks that seem to fix things for a while, but then the next update to windows 7 makes the NAS invisible. It has something to do with the fact that many (all?) NAS use Linux and samba (?) interface, and Win 7 sees this as a security threat. I have had a previous NAS enclosure die, and that was somewhat painful to recover the data from the disk drive since my PC could not read the Linux formatted drive.

So, in a perfect world, I would like to have a NAS enclosure with the following features, in descending order of importance:

Works with Win 7
Works with Win XP
I add the drive to the enclosure
Data and files stored on drive such that I could connect the drive to a PC via data and allow for reading
No special or annoying programs installed on the PCs

Any suggestions - recommendations?

 

[Maguscreed]

I used a buffalo NAS for several years and had no complaints from it. It's actually still alive so far as I know I passed it on to my nephew for his anime.

However, more recently dlink has tossed something up on the market that seems quite popular.
Newegg.com - D-Link DNS-325 ShareCenter 2-Bay Network Storage device with Streaming Apps


...mind you that is just the 'shell' you would have to put drives in it in addition to the initial cost. It actually has it's own little processor and streaming capacity though.

 

[lewist57]

Not bad, not sure that if I have a problem with the enclosure in the future that I can use a PC to recover the data directly. Perhaps none of the NAS enclosures use a native windows disk format.

 

[Maguscreed]

Many of them use a format called xfs.
Why they do this, I don't really know.
The alternative is to build a micro desktop and make your own nas with it.
There are actually a lot of options to go with on that front in this day and age too.
You could probably get a barebones slim desktop for not much more money than that NAS.