Bought a D-Link 2 bay (empty) 320 NAS unit from ebuyer. The first was DOA, but its replacement worked OK.
I had a couple of 'old' drives sat around: a 3 year old 1.5TB Samsung unit that had automatically 'set' itself down to 500Mb* and a reconditioned Seagate 1Tb drive that was sent as a replacement for another failed drive. Initially both drives were detected as 'faulty' because they had been partitioned and used with a mix of EXT4, NTFS and FAT32, but once they were reformatted (FAT32, no partition) they were recognised fine.
D-Link provide a wizard applet, and configuring the unit was relatively straight forward. I went for a 1TB RAID1 arrangement, mirroring data on both drives, and the spare 500Gb was allocated as JBOD. Ben can use that for music etc if he wants, while we keep the 1TB partition for work data and images. The other thing to remember was to establish sharing rights on the NAS. Not difficult, but it just required a bit of hunting around to find the appropriate controls to enable that. The NAS came with free incremental backup software that is now installed on Chris's computer, and I'll probably look into deja dup for the Linux box. Ben may also want to do something, since he's got 500Gb space.
User IDs were created and passwords assigned and it seems I can access
the shared drive wirelessly through the modem router/powerline adaptor
network from this Macbook. I'm not sure about wired network data rates,
but a 1.9Gb .iso file took around 9-10 min to write from here, and
multiple simultaneous transfers seemed to go almost as fast. assigned to him.
Time I learned a little more about network shares and linux too.
*Talking of drives re-setting themselves, this is the second seagate drive I've had do this. I bought 160Gb drive about 5 years ago, and that first shrank to around 50Gb, then 36Gb with a couple of subsequent install & partitioning sessions. In the end I bought a 250Gb drive and abandoned that one as faulty. Having read up recently about this, it seems some drives have their internal limit reduced randomly, and require it to be reset for full capacity to be recovered. The current version of Seatools does this fine, downloaded as a bootable CD/DVD although not as described on the seagate website (it's a simple menu option, rather than requiring you to enter R as an option in a dialogue box).
One more thing to finish off the geek-out. I keep looking at SSD replacements for this Macbook. Half of me thinks it's a great idea to keep it going for another 12-18 months, half would like to drop it off a cliff right now. So I prevaricate, not making it any better and not spending any money in the hope of justifying a replacement sooner. The one thing I've not looked at yet is running Office under Wine on Linux. If that would work then I'd very seriously consider trying to get some or other distro (preferably with KDE, although Mint/Cinnamon might be acceptable) running on it, and that would give it a much longer life.