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?
Have you thought about setting up an old PC with a RAID card and using FreeNAS? You get redundancy, network, and all you are really spending money on is going to be the RAID card and the drives if you have an old PC collecting dust.
http://www.freenas.org/
As luck would have it, slashdot has a thread on this today: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/21/141244
Although it’s not a requirement, I’m hoping to eliminate the server I have running at home in the interest of lowing my power consumption.
Part of the problem in running it as a server is physical space within the machine. Unless you get a server cabinet that can hold 6 or 8 disks ($$$ — both for the case and the power it consumes), you’re typically limited to two places to hang hard drives.
I’ve been playing around with a Linksys NSLUG as a low-end server replacement. I can’t get Pine (email client) running on it properly, and it’s got only a 10Mb network connection — or was it 100Mb? Either way, I’m hoping to do 1Gb ethernet for the media “server” to better support multiple devices talking to it at the same time.
I realize this makes the requirements more difficult, and I’m somewhat flexible on them, but I hope to find the perfect world here. A pipe dream, I’m sure.
Try this thing: http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10882
I am running the 500GB version and I am really happy with it. It runs a small Linux, so you can do stuff with it. I also allows you to connect an additional drive via USB2, which you could use as a backup. The gigabit ethernet works well for my music collection. I use iTunes on my desktop machine with the library residing on the Lacie unit. My Sonos pulls the music from the Lacie unit, so my desktop doesn’t have to be running all the time, which saves power. If you want access to local playlists from the desktop, you need to make sure it is available. The price on this thing is really good, I found. If you are trying to minimize your initial investment, Lacie is a hard one to beat IMHO.
Hey, Michael–
Have you looked at Windows Home Server? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116395
BOSD type, but you can use existing hardware, SATA drives, etc–and is network based that includes its own IP and domain so you can remote access and stream from anywhere, or use it as a web server. It also has a really easy interface, also does backups for I think up to 6 PCs daily. Doesn’t work with a Mac, though. I’n getting one of the contained ones from HP, but the link I sent is to the OEM–nice if you have a bunch of hardware laying around that is semi decent!
Richard