Fenderman beat me to it. Those micro PC's that people think are a deal are actually a rip off considering you can get much better performing full fledged i3 or i5 desktop PCs now for less than that price, and they have several orders better performance. i7s are also starting to trickle down to the $400 range, and multi TB drives are also cheap. It's like buying generic branded food in a grocery store, but paying more money than premium brands.
Low end NAS devices are some of the biggest rip offs in the industry, and their only marketing logic is they come with embedded Linux which saves you some money licensing Microsoft CALs - that's it. You have to get into the several thousand dollar range before NAS machines start to pay off, and that's usually because there's higher end software or hardware features involved like de-dupe or SAN like features.
Low end NAS devices are some of the biggest rip offs in the industry, and their only marketing logic is they come with embedded Linux which saves you some money licensing Microsoft CALs - that's it. You have to get into the several thousand dollar range before NAS machines start to pay off, and that's usually because there's higher end software or hardware features involved like de-dupe or SAN like features.
