Any recommendations for a reasonably priced desktop raid 1 NAS solution in the 500-1000G (net) neighborhood? I'm currently using 2 Sansdigital boxes and they seem fine. But technology keeps getting better (right?) and I'm looking around before buying another. Buffalo has a new 1tb (500g raid 1) box that can be had for $380. Just haven't seen any reviews. Any other suggestions or guidance?
If you can get by with a drive in or attached to one of the computers on your network it IMHO can be a lot cheaper and faster. I have two NAS on my network that are SLOOOOOW.. taking hours to back up a few gig.
A modified sneaker net where you carry the portable external drive from computer to computer seems to be faster an more efficient unless you have a wired vs wireless network. I have seen the new APPLE WIFI router that has a USB port for NAS purposes..looks promising, but I have no experience with it.
I did a synctoy copy of all my files initially to my Secondary drive, then setup a synctoy from the secondary drive to the USB2.0 drive.
I am not using Raid 1, but doing nightly backups between the three drives, if any one of them goes dead, I have the other two with current data. And in the unlikely and bizarre event that two of them go dead, I still have the third for backup.
Raid-1 is nice, but keep in mind (and any self respecting IT/IS guy will say the same) that it isnt a backup, only a failure solution, so make sure you have a real backup plan for long term storage/archiving.
If you are going to get a NAS, go Gigabit and make sure you have gig capability on your system and switches as well.
SaigonK, you are on the money with that statement. Regular backups are good if you are using some kind of sync programs for your other backups. If you make a mistake with data or you get virused, expect that to be synced too.
I just added an e-sata single-drive external enclosure with a removable tray for easy backup to hard drives that I can take off site.
The removable tray means that I can use the drives of my choice in an external drive system for backups and carry the drives themselves (without enclosure) off-site with no hassle. You remove the tray, attach a hard drive with 4 little screws, insert the tray into the enclosure, connect the enclosure via a cable to the back of the PC, and you're up and running.
E-sata means that the external drive connects (in essence) directly to a sata hard drive port on the motherboard, via a cable to a connector on the back of the PC which in turn has a cable into the SATA port. The bandwidth is much more than you'd see with NAS. That said, it still took something like 20 hours to do a full backup of a full 320 GB hard drive. I can't imagine how long it'd take to do that over a 100MB network, Yikes. E-sata is nominally 3GB/s but in practice I think it's something like 1.5GB.
Also, the particular enclosure I selected is fanless and so dead quiet.
I paid somewhere around $200+ for the enclosure (Icy Dock -- make sure it has esata) and a 700+GB hard drive. Didn't want to spend upwards of 500 for raid eclosure, and was very concerned about bandwidth over an ethernet.
I just purchased a Guardian Maximus Raid 1 setup (from Newer Technology), and it worked great. It's Firewire 800 capable and even at Firewire 400 I backed up 300GB pretty fast - a couple of hours. A few fairly lame but capable backup programs came with it, but it also works with Apple's Time Machine software built into Leopard. As RAID 1 does, it comes with two hard drives that mirror each other automatically so if one of your backup drives goes down you can see and replace it without losing data. If your primary drive goes down, of course, it is an exact clone of the drive you just lost so you can access it and work from it without any down time.
This is a great backup solution for me, we got the 500GB (two 500GB drives mirrored) configuration for $400. The price starts jumping inordinately for 750GB and 1TB. We're considering a second one or even a third one to move off site for a pretty foolproof strategy. USB or 100mbps Ethernet sucks as far as transfer speeds. We have a gigabit network with Apple computers so even backups across the network perform adequately.
Edited by Trent Allen on Dec 29, 2007 at 07:53 PM GMT (Reason: clarification)
The Buffalo is a great value if you price the cost of a drive enclosure, RAID card, NIC, and the 4 drives. It implements RAID in software to keep the cost down and this has a big impact on its performance.
I upgraded mine to a NetGear ReadyNAS and this unit is 2-6 times as fast as the Buffalo depending upon the operation. The biggest performance difference is with accessing directories or performing actions on many files at the same time. At a cost of $1 per gigabyte this is hardly an expensive solution.
RAID in a spare PC is fine if you have the space, are sure the power supply and case fan are up to the task and factor in a $400 RAID card and the cost for cables and the drives and a 1 GB Ethernet adapter. You can do software RAID but the performance will be poor.
I'm running a RAID 0+1 im my PC and for backup there is a 500GB external USB-drive.
For backing up i use a free tool caled "dirsync" wich speeds the whole process up extremely because it makes incremental backups.
Like you i'm looking for something to put in the basement but something that allows me to encrypt and specify user access.
So in the end I guess it's going to be a small fileserver running Linux with tons of HD's in RAID5.
Another option to look at is drobo (http://www.drobo.com) Looks like a very neat solution. I came across drobo about a month after I bought the buffallo terastation. While I'm happy with the buffallo, the flexibility to change that the drobo offers looks amazing.
I've the Buffalo running on a 1 gig network, and I feel it's not fast enough to use as main disks. Perfect for on-line backup especially if you have more than one computer.
I use a maxtor firewire unit with 2 500gb disks mirrored as my main disk unit, and am happy with it (other than the fact it's full, and I'm looking again and what to do next).
Looks like a slightly different offering. The HP box offers more than the others but (excluding the drobo) is more expensive. Buffallo or Netgear and standard NAS systems and very cost effective. The drobo is a bit unique and more expensive.
The HP looks like a nice solution for a home network where you want to share various media (incl iTunes) with all those different devices
I do not know the cost but HP\Compaq generally build very good Servers and their units are way better that their desktops. Personally, I would buy (I did buy their Media Vault and very happy with it) their server range but not a desktop.
