Best 1 TB+ storage solution

pg_rider · Wed Jan 17, 2007 3:08 pm

About a year ago we upgraded to a PC with two 320 GB hard drives thinking that would be enough storage space for a loooooong time. Well, it's not! Would love to get a 1 TB or bigger NAS; I know at one time the Infrant ReadyNAS was the front runner and came in around $1000. Is that still the case? Is there something better and/or cheaper? I have a very simple setup -- basic network with PC and my PB on it. I want something that is simple to set up and use... would I be better off just going to bigger or more hard drives?

CaminoFrancisco · Wed Jan 17, 2007 7:48 pm

I LOVE my Infrant ReadyNAS solutions. I have 2x1.5TB X600s and 1x1.5TB NV. They are fast, affordable, and, from my experience, trouble free. I have had the X600s for about 2 years and the NV for about 9 months.

I would highly recommend them!

Camino

CaminoFrancisco · Wed Jan 17, 2007 7:49 pm

Forgot to say. All bought from NewEgg.com - NewEgg rules!

pg_rider · Thu Jan 18, 2007 8:53 am

Jeez, looks like they're still around $1k per TB. This one seems like the best deal, but it's an open box:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 822329010R

I would have thought price-per-TB would be lower by now...

dj7675 · Thu Jan 18, 2007 3:04 pm

I have a 1.6 tb infrant x6, 1 nv with 4 750 drives, and a buffalo terastation 1tb. All have worked very well. If you don't need the features of the infrant boxes, the terastation makes a nice unit as well. See links below. Buy has a special for the 1tb for just 549 or the 2tb pro for 1211 which are really very good values. I streat HD from the terrastion without problem. Remember that
if you want them raid protected reduce the storage by about 1/4 for your actual storage amount you really get.... --Darin

http://www.buy.com/prod/Buffalo_TeraSta ... 96259.html
http://www.buy.com/prod/Buffalo_2_0_Ter ... 08876.html

PSmith · Thu Jan 18, 2007 10:07 pm

'protection', ie RAID-5 size calculating as (n-1)*size, where n - total disks; all disks should have same size or 'size' will be selected as a size of smallest
btw, n>2 !

so, for n=3, total size of RAID-5 will be less 33%
n=4 - 25%
n=5 - 20%
n=6 - 16.7%
...
n=100 - 1%

Bgrubb1 · Fri Feb 08, 2008 9:53 pm

I am contemplating shutting down my PC and going to a NAS only environment to feed my Photobridges. Based on my research, the ReadyNAS is still the animal of choice. Unfortunatly, it looks like the NO drive models that had an MSRP of $699 are non existent. I found one site that claims to still have them for $899 which is a little too pricey. Does anyone in the community know of a better site or a better solution at this point ??

mas · Sat Feb 09, 2008 12:01 pm

Cheaper, but more work would be to build a Mini-ITX computer with HD raid on your own.

Is 1 TB and raid a neccessity? Also consider costs through energy. TB raids require multiple 3.5'' harddrives, you pay a nice yearly energy fee for that if runing it 24/7/356. Over the years that aggregates.

I have a 250 GB MiniITX with 22W idle consumption running here for 310 EUR incl. shipping.

Took me a few hours to setup though.

dgburns · Wed Mar 19, 2008 3:32 am

PSmith wrote:
'protection', ie RAID-5 size calculating as (n-1)*size, where n - total disks; all disks should have same size or 'size' will be selected as a size of smallest
btw, n>2 !

so, for n=3, total size of RAID-5 will be less 33%
n=4 - 25%
n=5 - 20%
n=6 - 16.7%
...
n=100 - 1%

Can you IMAGINE the rebuild time for n=100??? AND the likelihood of a single disc failure is MUCH higher, as well as is likelihood of multiple disc failure (in which case all data is lost).
RAID-5 "protection" (IMHO) is only practical for n=4 or n=5.

pg_rider · Sun Apr 13, 2008 7:23 am

I'm about to pull trigger on the beast below. Question though -- I thought I read somewhere that with the Buffalo products the drives are not user-replaceable. In other words, when a drive goes bad you have to send it in for a replacement. Can anyone confirm or deny?

http://www.buy.com/prod/buffalo-2tb-drivestation-quattro-turbousb-dual-interface-usb-2-0-esata/q/loc/101/206709227.html#cRevSec

pg_rider · Mon Apr 14, 2008 8:05 am

And then of course there's this one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000R9 ... lectronics

At this point I'm at a loss, and to further complicate matters my wife (who's an IT tech) wants to simply buy two 1 TB external eSATA hard drives; one as primary for serving up our media and the other as a backup (kinda like RAID 1 I suppose).

I JUST WANT A SIMPLE, UPGRADEABLE STORAGE SOLUTION!!!!

fshagan · Mon Apr 14, 2008 8:42 am

"Simple and upgradable" sounds like what your wife is suggesting ... eSATA USB drives. Especially if you don't need the "real time" protection the RAID solutions provide. If you are comfortable with nightly backups, they could probably serve you pretty well.

The other option would be to put together an inexpensive Windows Home Server machine. It doesn't need a cutting edge processor, graphics card, etc. WHS comes with some pretty good backup software and has a media server included. HP is packaging a 500gb version for less than $600 (see http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B000UY1WSK/homeserver-20 for an example). The HP version includes 4 empty drive bays for expansion.

If you have an older machine laying around, it might serve this purpose as well.

pg_rider · Mon Apr 14, 2008 12:58 pm

fshagan wrote:
"Simple and upgradable" sounds like what your wife is suggesting ... eSATA USB drives. Especially if you don't need the "real time" protection the RAID solutions provide. If you are comfortable with nightly backups, they could probably serve you pretty well.

Yeah, I'm kind of liking this solution actually. One question -- will USB 2.0 be fast enough to stream HD files?

fshagan · Mon Apr 14, 2008 1:20 pm

pg_rider wrote:
fshagan wrote:
"Simple and upgradable" sounds like what your wife is suggesting ... eSATA USB drives. Especially if you don't need the "real time" protection the RAID solutions provide. If you are comfortable with nightly backups, they could probably serve you pretty well.

Yeah, I'm kind of liking this solution actually. One question -- will USB 2.0 be fast enough to stream HD files?

I don't know ... But I guess that could be a problem. USB 2.0 is rated at "up to" 480 mbps (about 32 MB per second, I guess). I don't know what the actual throughput is of USB devices, but there is a recent review of several USB drives at Tom's Hardware that shows a range from below 30 MB per second to about the maximum of 32 MB per second. With read/write cycles, they estimate you would transfer data at only about 15 - 20 MB per second. Firewire did better on one drive, but the other seemed "throttled" at the 30 MB per second rate.

pg_rider · Tue Apr 15, 2008 7:52 am

So we picked up this 1 TB network-connectable external hard drive for $320 at Best Buy:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=347

Haven't tried to see it from the Roku yet as we've been busy moving files over to it. Hopefully it works! We plan to pick up another one just like it to act as a backup...

Best 1 TB+ storage solution

Best 1 TB+ storage solution

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