Need a good RAID NAS solution

There was a recent thread on this topic with some good ideas:

My advice is to build a FreeNAS server. Cheap hardware, free software, built in redundancy, fairly easy to set up. The biggest expense will be the drives ($50/TB )but you don't need to buy them all at once.

Home NAS solutions are way overpriced and underwhelming in features. If you don't want to build a server, get 4 bay enclosure and plug it into your existing PC via eSATA. Lots of good info on various options in this recent thread:

An enclosure should set you back about $100 + HDDs. It would help if you provided a budget and what you're hoping to get out of the system.

Man, there are probably 100 threads on this already...
Got an unRaid box myself with around 16tb of storage. Cost? About $200 in parts + a few bits lying around + drives. Dirt simple and very flexible (which was key for my setup)
There are others out that with different levels of speed and functionality, but I've been very pleased with the setup

If you don't want to build one yourself, I believe the guy at unRaid will build one for you...

The best of the breed - looking at reviews , excluding the quite expensive high end business solutions - seem to be the Synology family of NAS, like the 212+ model or bigger, featuring i.e. a 2 GHz CPU and hardware-based on-the-fly encryption.
Different RAID options can be configured and a lot of protocols are been supported. Throughput seems to be excellent.
Depending on the model chosen it may provide a *lot* of storage really.
Check the manufacturers site for this http://www.synology.com/us/index.php

There is at least one company that makes custom servers for HTPC.

That's what I would do.

The Buffalo would work but you're essentially paying $430 for the enclosure ($1,030 - 4x $150 for the disks). For that price you could get a server that you could add more disks to later or use for all sorts of different things. Also keep in mind the Buffalo isn't a NAS. You would have to plug it into your PC.

If you go the enclosure route, I would recommend getting something cheaper and doing software raid.

I had very bad experiences with Buffalo. I forgot which one I had but you need their drives as the OS is on the drive. It ending up failing about 4 weeks after I bought it. Sent it back to Buffalo and they sat on the RMA for over a month.

I went with a TheCus N4100Pro. I liked it so much I now own three of them. They all have 2tb drives in them configured as RAID 5. The rebuild works easily, I had a drive failure and it was easy to hot swap a drive. The web interface is easy to use. They are not the fastest king of the road out there but to stream bluray rips and music with XBMC they work perfectly. I paid less than $400 for it and they support BYOD.

I think the Qnap are the equal of the Synology.

I've had the Qnap TS-412-US on my "one of these days" list for a while.