Re: I know just enough to be completely lost

You want to buy from a vendor that knows what they are doing.
At Small Tree, we spend a lot of time testing this stuff as well as supporting it. *most* of the calls are not problems with our hardware or configuration. It's mostly other things. Apple bugs, setup problems, permissions problems, usage problems, FCP problems. We work through them all.
The main issue is that we aggregate the experience of all our customers into one place. So you either don't hit those problems, or when you do, we know how to fix them fast so you're back to getting your work done.
What makes us special is that our networking cards and drivers are used by anyone doing a Mac based NAS. So we get a good look at everything.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications