Won't anyone build me a good home NAS?

One of the things that has been perplexing me as a technology person is an elegant home-media storage server. I've used many of the popular NAS (network attached storage) devices on the market and while some are certainly better than others, I still haven't come across one that would quite do it for me.

I was really hoping the Windows MediaSmart Server would do it but it is still a little too dumbed down but physically it's great (or at least HPs first iteration is). It holds 4 SATA drives, is quite small, and doesn't use a whole lot of power. It is designed to be your media repository, can host photo albums from photo dumps to a directory, and can be your unified Windows backup server. HP's even has a FireFly server which can host your music files and they're available to client computers on the same network via iTunes. Heck, the thing even looks great.

Unfortunately the MediaSmart OS (based on Windows Server 2003, which is very robust) talks limited protocols (SMB-CIFS) for file sharing, doesn't allow any manual disk configuration, and it requires a fat client to be installed to interface with it that uses ActiveX. In other words, you have to use Windows to manage it. If they would have built it with some open-standards and advanced configurations they could sell a lot more of these things because people are missing the boat on this one. There are plenty of Mac and Linux people out there who are just looking for a good product for doing this and they don't want to deal with the one or 2 hard drive enclosures. They want something that's functional and affordable. By the way, it was recently reviewed on SmallNetBuilder. The best thing I've seen so far for this is the ReadyNAS which has been acquired by Netgear recently but it's very expensive by comparison.

If any of the manufacturers are listening, here's what I want: a small 4 drive SATA enclosure with USB or FireWire expandability, multiple options for disk configuration (RAID0, 1, 5, or simple JBOD with the option to snapshot from one drive to another, multiple file protocols (SMB-CIFS, AFP, and probably most importantly, WebDAV), web access, an iTunes server with UPnP (Firefly?), and if possible, a database server (MySQL is fine). Administration should be available through a web interface and a nice Java-based fat client.

Since the MediaSmart doesn't fit the bill I guess I'll keep adding external hard drives to my Mac Mini. For anyone keeping track, I now have 12 hard drives hanging off my Core Duo 2 GB Mac Mini and 2 Plextor TV tuners. I have a total of 6.5 TB of storage, half of it usable and the other half getting a weekly snapshot of the first 3.25 TB. So far it's still working and I'm amazed it can keep up, though I suspect I'll find the limit soon.