Anyone have any insight into inexpensive but plentiful storage systems?
I’m finally at the point where it’s time to start re-ripping my CD collection into some lossless format. My estimates are that it will take between about 700-750G to hold the whole thing. I need to keep one copy at home and on-line for the home-audio system, and I’d like it to be network attached. Hopefully it’s reasonably priced so I can afford a second one as the project goes forward to have some kind of off-site backup.
I’ve looked at the Drobo, and really like the idea, but it’s USB only and costs $500 for the empty cabinet, then you still have to add drives.
Western Digital’s MyBook World II Edition looks pretty good, with gig-ethernet, compact size, and decent price (about $300 right now from buy.com for the 1T model w/ 2x500G drives). Although that assumes you stripe the included drives to get the 1T, which means a drive failure takes out the entire collection, making a second unit for off-site storage far more important.
LaCie has a similar product (to the WD MyBook) for about $450 via buy.com, but USB 2.0, no network. Same problems with the redundancy part.
There’s also Hammer Storage, who has a 2T unit with network support (2x1T drives) for about $650. Price is higher and the unit is larger, so that makes off-site a bit more difficult.
Anyone else have any thoughts or suggestions?