Macs can be problematic
I bought a Buffalo NAS a few years ago only to find it wasn't compatible with MAC's AFP. Buffalo were unapologetic (Apple's fault for changing the protocol) and Apple had the same "we implemented the spec. correctly and the other 99.9% of the world is wrong" excuse it has for everything (e.g. iCal invites, mail attachments, etc). I managed to get it working by using a different file manager, but it's a bit of a pain.
I also have a QNAP 410NAS. This has a time machine function which worked OK except that every few weeks I got an error message along the lines of "the time machine backup is corrupt and needs to be replaced". It was a pain because of the time it took to back up the 300GB of crap I've got and also because I lost backups. I bought a Time Capsule and gave up with NAS backups. The QNAP is also very slow. It takes about 20 mins to upload a ripped DVD on wired SMB and isn't much faster on FTP - which is way slower than the 25MB/s quoted. I'm not a tecchie, but my internet research blames either NAS OS or Mac OS or both. The NAS also doesn't cope very well with the Mac's attempts to write hidden files to shares when copying - so after 20 mins of trying to copy a DVD to a share it often comes back with a write error. FTP works OK (and makes me feel like an engineer again!).
I must stress that, apart from the hidden file thing, these problems are a three or four years old, so might have been fixed by firmware updates. The message is that Mac owners need to do a bit of extra research before buying NAS.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
