Home Network Data Storage Device

It happened again- a machine on my home network died. Taking with it tons of data. It's mostly backed up. No huge loss. But I finally think it's time to get some sort of network raid disk. A unified place to safely store data accessible to the numerous machines on my home lan. So now I pose to Slashdot readers- what are your recommendations? I'm looking for something with RAID and SMB sharing. At least a quarter TB, probably a half, but with some room to grow. What have you used? What works? What fails?

recomdation

[Anonymous Coward]

i reccomend you eat myy ass

Wow! Research!

[Foxxz]

There are dozens of products out there to do this. Linksys alone makes several. You obviously didn't search slashdot, google, etc. The fact this article got accepted... Words fail me.

-Foxxz

2.5 Terabytes of storage

[Steev]

If you have the funds, this looks promising.
LaCie Biggest F800 1.6TB RAID Storage 300943U [costco.ca] (USB 2.0, Firewire 800).

It's only CAD $2,599.99, so that's like US $100 :)

Re:Wow! Research!

[xlr8ed]

"The fact this article got accepted... Words fail me."

I think he has a bit of pull with one of the Editor's...

easy answer

[circletimessquare]

you can download all of that porn you lost from the usenet. think of those binary newsgroups as an always on, multiply redundant network backup of all of that porn you lost

How???

[DAldredge]

How can you dupe so many stories yet fail to dupe your own data? :)

New device

[joe 155]

I discovered something the other day which sounds perfect, you can expand it almost infinately to hold as much data as you want, although on the downside the upload takes a while... Still, it never crashes - not even in a thousand years.

the sales guy said it was called "paper"... strange thing

Re:The Poor Man's RAID Array

[harrkev]

You can do it even cheaper. Check out this page:

http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm [8k.com]

That guy uses floppies in a RAID setup using a macintosh.

So, my guess is that you do not even need any raid cards. Just a 2nd hand iMac, and about 150,000 USB floppy drives. Of course, you might have to stack a USB hub or two in there.

If you can get your hands on old USB Zip drives, you should only need about 2500 of those.

Who says I don't know how to save a buck. Who needs expensive RAID cards?

Let me know how it turns out.

Dear CmdrTaco

[this great guy]

It happened again- a machine on my home network died.

Dear CmdrTaco, I am sorry to have to announce this to you, but honestly I just don't care.

Love, this great guy.

The obvious solution!

[grolschie]

100 gmail accounts, GmailFS installed on your PCs, and highspeed innuh-net! ;-)

Re:easy answer

[Lehk228]

but what if his news services stops carrying alt.sex.pedophilia

Re:Wow! Research!

[justasecond]

He has a bit of pull with one of the Editor's what?

Re:The Poor Man's RAID Array

[avronius]

Interestingly enough, you'd spend more on your electrical bill over the course of 2-3 months than you've "saved" by not buying some new gear. You do get an alternate heating source out of the bargain...

Re:The Poor Man's RAID Array

[jrockway]

> Yes, but he was saying that it has 2 SATA ports, and RAID is not supported on the PATA ports. So how do you get 4 drives into the array?

Partitioning, man, partitioning. I have a nice 4G drive partitioned into 4 1G disks and am running RAID 5 on it. Not only are read speeds increased, but if one partition fails I'll only have to replace that partition. Amazing! :)

Re:The Poor Man's RAID Array

[shawb]

Not to mention that the cheapest floppy drive I found on quick newegg and froogle searches was $5.00 (And that's not even USB, but let's go with it.) Let's just assume that with that sort of volume you can pick them up for $1.00 a unit. That's still $150,000 just for the drives, and you still have to worry about cables, floppy media, hubs and controllers (I believe one USB root hub can only control 127 root devices, uncluding hubs, so let's say about 100 floppy drives and 30 hubs per controller, means 1,500 USB controllers plus 45,000 hubs (powered of cours). This means you have to run power to every floppy drive, or at the very least to every hub, so you have quite possibly several miles of cable to deal with, and some way to generate all this electrical power (Hint: your standard home fusebox probably won't handle it. assume half an amp per device at 12 volts, that's 6 watts, that's almost a megawatt of power assuming good efficiency, so expect no less than about 1000 amps in your standard household 120v current just to power the drives.) and then dissipate the extra heat. And a place to put a square of 400X400 floppies, plus all the auxillary equipment won't be free.

So, we're easilly talking on the order of... a million dollars in equipment, labor and other expenses. Oh, and this is just talking about RAID 0. If any of those 150,000 floppies fail the whole array fails. Even with massive redundancy you will still need at least a full time employee going around swapping in floppies when one fails. Not to mention you'd need to multiply all the original costs by the amount of redundancy, plus overhead (we're talking having to hire managers and middle managers to coordinate the whole process.)

Re:The Poor Man's RAID Array

[sharkey]

If you can get your hands on old USB Zip drives, you should only need about 2500 of those.

Recipe for hearing loss: 2500 Clicks of Death at the same time.