I went into Wireless1 today (Parramatta NSW) to grab the Norton + Asus RT-N13 bundle posted by acek47 and saw these two awesome deals. Whipped out the phone and did a quick check on staticice, getprice etc and was cheapest I could find.
NetGear Stora MS2000 for $59
My review: This is user friendly NAS at its very best. I needed another NAS unit and was contemplating picking up one of those HP Microserver deals, but at this price it was a no brainer. Even though I am quite tech savvy, I just didn't want to muck about setting up FreeNAS etc on the HP. With this just plonk in a cheap internal drive (or 2) and you can use either the full capacity of both or set it up where one drive mirrors the other (like RAID). I am impressed by the fact that even at this price there's quite a bit of flexibility and options available if you want to use more advanced features rather than just have a simple setup. It's also looks pretty good and takes up much less space than my WD ShareSpace NAS. I'll post more thoughts after I've had a better play with it.
Asus RT-N56U Dual Band Wireless N Router + Norton 360 v6 Retail for $209 - $60 cashback from Norton = $149
At this price was the cheapest I could find for the router alone, with the Norton a bonus (maybe eBay it).
My review: I picked up this router last year given the great reviews on lots of tech sites including smallnetbuilder, cnet etc and am extremely pleased with it. Yes you can't put custom firmware on it like DD-WRT and Tomato, but Asus pumps out firmware updates pretty often and the latest version which I downloaded few weeks back is awesome. Router runs very well with no reboots so far, excellent range and most importantly streams HD via the attached USB HDD (the router has 2 x USB ports) to my TV in the lounge without skips. Also has a BT download manager so I don't need to have a computer running all day whilst downloading all those "linux distros" :D Anyway ended up grabbing one as an early birthday present for the bestie - he's a big an of my setup and he's still on Linksys WRT54G so I thought this will nicely bring him into this decade.
Some thoughts:
- Pickup is free from the Parramatta store. I did a quick check on their postage calculator (which thank god doesn't require you to log in first) and most metro cities around Australia were between $9 and $15, which seems reasonable.
- Norton cashbacks expire end of this month so get in quick if you are keen. More details here: http://au.norton.com/360-cashback/promo
- Been a while since my last post, been doing more hoarding than contributing so hope others find this useful too :) Sorry if TLDR, thought some might find the end user feedback handy.
Careful with the NetGear Stora. It will likely only satisfy the most basic of uses. Like always, do research! ;)