New Toys....

[fish]

Just found somewhere stocking the brand new Netgear SC101. £75 from www.broadbandstuff.co.uk Cant wait to get mine usees IDE drives can span and raid and is a SAN device.:bounce:

[shadytree]

You really need to get out more Fish

[charlie sprout]

I've been waiting for these as well. Are they available now? The Netgear website still says 'coming soon'

[fish]

yep the only place i've found today is as above broadbandstuff will be delivered tommorrow

[shadytree]

fish said:

yep the only place i've found today is as above broadbandstuff will be delivered tommorrow

So please explain to us numpties what it is and why so good fish ?

[fish]

Basically you can stick any one or two IDE hardrives in and it will either stick them together(spanning) or mirror them(raid) and once plugged into your network it will appear as a local drive when setup.

So basically for me I have all our photos on my PC which I therefore have to leave on all day so Lisa can access them. Now I can put all our info on this netgear, films photos etc and leave that on. It comes with backup software so I could get it to duplicate itself back to my PC for safety. SO I won't loose data. More importantly for me it will be in aseperate building so all our important data will be safe from theft, fire and equipment failure.

It is alot cheaper than running another PC and my PC won't be slowed down when I am playing games etc.

To put it in perspective you could buy this £75 stick two 250GB IDEs in, span them and you have as far as the PC is concerned one 500GB media server.

This product will revolutionise cheap data storage for people and is alot cheaper than buying an integrated solution which you a) can't upgrade by putting more disk space in b)doesn't come wit backup, raid capability.

The wireless products while good don't have the same transfer rates so can appear slow when opening larger files.

Hope that Helps.

[Plotloss]

Its a toy though really, you could achieve the same end for far less cash with a linux variant and an old pc.

[shadytree]

At the moment I have a 250gb USB external drive, that I store all my mutimedia garbage on. What's the advantages of this new piece of kit then?

Sorry If I'm a bit slow here.

[Plotloss]

Your USB drive is attached to a PC meaning that for anyone else to access that drive on your network (if you have one) your machine has to be on.

From what I gather here, this is network attached so only needs power to be accesible network wide.

[fish]

Yep

Also I don't do linux and I wan't something smaller than another old PC cluttering up the way.

Your external USB drive would be fine however it wouldn't be raidable and do you back it up???

[Plotloss]

Linux on an Epia mobo would do the job in a box smaller than a car stereo...

[fish]

But by the time I've learnt Linux we could be talking weeks worth of time though...

[Plotloss]

You underestimate yourself.

[agent006]

The SAN abilites look rather good though. I assume it appears as a full local drive then, rather than a mapping.

[bogie]

yhea - Ive got mine already - its great....got 600GB of extra 'movie' storage now

[stuh]

Looks like a winner

I bought myself a Buffalo Gigastation NAS a few months back and it's superb. It's serving as the file server for my SONOS audio system. 750BG of RAID5. Biggest bonus is it's completely silent! The days of using old PC's for storage are numbered.

[-DeaDLocK-]

Unless it's being run over Gigabit Ethernet, I reckon it'd be painfully slow.

[fish]

Shouldn't be too bad, my internal hard drives come in at about 135meg sec the Netgear apparently can sustain 85 over a 100 meg network.

Okay USB drives can trf at 400 odd but everything else can't keep up anyway. Your downloads will be less than a 10meg network anyway.