Mass Storage device

[shadytree]

Mass storage for home Network.

After doing a lot of searching I've come to the conclusion you can't do better than one of these?



Buffalo - Terastation

Any opinions or alternatives please !!

[Plotloss]

Tidy little device that. Highly recommended.

If you want something a little bigger though, up to 8TB then you know where I am...

[shadytree]

Plotloss said:

Tidy little device that. Highly recommended. If you want something a little bigger though, up to 8TB then you know where I am...

How much does the 8TB bastard set you back Matt ?

[_dobbo_]

We've got a terastation, it's a useful little box and can be configured in Raid 5 for redundancy.

Also cool is the fact that you can hang loads of other USB drives off it thus allowing lots of expansion.

[shadytree]

Raid 5 ?

Backup yes?

Rich mentioned to me about that. Can you expalin in 'Simple' terms what that does and how you configure it please?

[Plotloss]

RAID 5 is a backup technology.

There are 4 400Gb disks inside that box.

75% of each disk is useable data storage, 25% whats called Parity.

In effect any disk can fail and you can replace it without losing the data that was on it as that data gets rebuilt from the parity disk.

I think thats how it works anyway, it could be that one of the disks is set aside as a parity disk.

[shadytree]

Cool sound just the sort of puppy I need.

where's me credit card gone

[Plotloss]

YHM about the 8TB option, brace yourself though

[shadytree]

Plotloss said:

YHM about the 8TB option, brace yourself though

YHM as well

[nickjm]

Plotloss said:

RAID 5 is a backup technology. There are 4 400Gb disks inside that box. 75% of each disk is useable data storage, 25% whats called Parity. In effect any disk can fail and you can replace it without losing the data that was on it as that data gets rebuilt from the parity disk. I think thats how it works anyway, it could be that one of the disks is set aside as a parity disk.

Yep, one of the disks is parity, and the other three all add up to the storage space.

[ErnestM]

It's not network storage, but it is an alternative. I just installed one of these last night:

www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10458

2.5 terrabytes. RAID 0. The new version of Premier Pro works better with a stripe set for fast rendering. You can also do other RAID configurations or JBOD.

It's not as big as it looks in the product description. Here's my desktop:



(Just wondering if the 30 inch Dell widescreen monitor will have room. Oh, well. I'll find out this week.)


ErnestM

[annodomini2]

If you want one on the cheap there's always this, just need an old pc and 4 Harddrives.

NAS Lite

>> Edited by annodomini2 on Monday 13th February 13:57

[_dobbo_]

annodomini2 said:

If you want one on the cheap there's always this, just need an old pc and 4 Harddrives. NAS Lite

Four 250GB harddisks will likely come in at a high enough cost that it's cheaper in the long run to buy the terastation, plug it in, and forget about it...

[Plotloss]

_dobbo_ said:

annodomini2 said: If you want one on the cheap there's always this, just need an old pc and 4 Harddrives. NAS Lite Four 250GB harddisks will likely come in at a high enough cost that it's cheaper in the long run to buy the terastation, plug it in, and forget about it...

You save about £200 against the 1Tb model, losing RAID5 admittedly.

250Gb, £75 odd.

[shadytree]

Plotloss said:

_dobbo_ said: annodomini2 said: If you want one on the cheap there's always this, just need an old pc and 4 Harddrives. NAS Lite Four 250GB harddisks will likely come in at a high enough cost that it's cheaper in the long run to buy the terastation, plug it in, and forget about it... You save about £200 against the 1Tb model, losing RAID5 admittedly. 250Gb, £75 odd.

Shirley it's better to keep the Raid5 backup isn't it?

[_dobbo_]

shadytree said:

Shirley it's better to keep the Raid5 backup isn't it?

Depends how important the data is!

Personally (ie at home), I keep two copies of my essential stuff, one on a 250GB external disk and one on the PC itself.

At work we don't have a single bit of critical data that's not on RAID5 with a hot standy disk incase of failure.

Business and home requirements rarely match up, but in the case of this Terastation you are getting tons of storage and redundancy for very little cash, hence

[aldi]

Bear in mind that RAID only protects you against hard disk faliure, not against little slips of the mouse.

[fish]

I run a 300gb gigastation matched to a 300gb sata in the main PC. It is software synchronised every 15mins.

The Buffalo is in another building so it is also fireproof

[gizard]

I'm looking at buying one of these buffalo gigastation/terrastations. I use a laptop an awful lot - currently I back it up using an external 2.5" drive - which would be fine - except I sometimes take the external drive around with the laptop (pretty stupid!) - I have a large home PC which I can't be bothered to turn on to backup the laptop too. So I was thinking of using the Buffalo to back up both the PC and the laptop to. - Does anyone know of a media player that can play both audio and video from a network source (other than a media centre) - to go with a std. hifi format?

[zumbruk]

annodomini2 said:

If you want one on the cheap there's always this, just need an old pc and 4 Harddrives. NAS Lite

Looks suspiciously like they're in contravention of the GPL.

You could get a friendly Linux geek to set you something like this up for a couple of beers.