Hi All,

I need to get an external storage solution. I was considering an Ethernet device, but the premium you have to pay for that seems nuts.

I read some horrible reviews on the Lacie Big Disk series as they say they get very hot with no fan.

Any other recommendations? I'll be connecting via USB 2.0, so FW400/800 isn't really important... Looking for the largest I can get without spending > $300 or so.

- Thanx
- Jon

You can buy external USB enclosures that can support any IDE device. I'd just grab one of those (Mark would suggest you find one that has an internal power supply so you can use any old power cable and not have a brick; sound advice) and buy whatever hard drive you'd like.

An enclosure with an internal PSU is hotter than one with a brick on a leash PSU however.

The LaCie Big Disk stuff is all just striped RAID so if one HD goes then all your data goes with it.

Like Bitt said. Then you can get a 400Gb drive for as low as $255. Of course, as far as I've seen it's hard to find a good enclosure for under $45. Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough, though.

I bought this at Best Buy a few days ago. It was plug and play and I'm really happy with it so far...I was able to transfer 55 Gb of music files to it in about 30 mins too.

Are there any data integrity issues with external large hard drives? I had an orignal (USB1 era) hard drive enclosure, and I found I could not trust it from problems with the filesystem. I have also heard random reports of data problems, bad files, etc. Can external USB class devices be trusted for long term archiving?

I personally have a Linksys NSLU2 and a Seagate 300gig external USB drive. I absolutly love this setup...

Saw one of these in Best Buy at the weekend http://www.mirra.com/product/index.html where it sells for $400 for 160GB of storage (bigger sizes available).
Probably way over kill for what you want but it was an intresting piece of hardwar none the less.

Are you sure you don't want LaCie?

There is always external SATA. After trialing a single external SATA drive, I now know that my next server will be a fanless mini-itx box with three large fanless external SATA drives and RAID5 (or maybe two drives and mirroring).

I use a Buffalo Terastation, 1 terabyte, with 4 250 gig hard drives in a RAID-5 config (for an effective 700 gig or so after parity disk and formatting losses. It's network attached and standalone, has a very small physical footprint and is whisper quiet. I've got all my music and videos on it, and then my mythtv box/jukebox mounts it via SMB and serves up the content (plays music/videos locally or streams music to remote boxes).

It serves up via samba/CIFS and appletalk, and has FTP access. I HIGHLY recommend using the FTP access to get your files onto the box, the CIFS write access is abominably slow (even factoring in the inherent slow writes on RAID 5). The box and tech notes claim that it does NFS but that's a bald faced lie, it doesn't do NFS at all. It also has 4 USB ports to hang additional storage off of or to act as a print server for a USB attached printer.

It's not the best of breed, it's got issues... however I got it for around $700 after rebates at Frys, which beats having to pay around $600 for all the parts to build one out of a small linux box and then administer it.

Of course, for work I just built a 2 terabyte NAS box out of an old PC with Ubuntu (server) installed. It's got 6 400 gig hard drives set up as RAID 0 and serves the ~2 terabytes of storage via NFS. We use it as sort of a "sneakernet on 'roids" type of deal for backing up or transferring huge database partitions.

I'm hoping to stumble across a mini enclosure (like the shuttles) with more than 2 drive bays and enough PSU to juice at least 4 IDE drives. I have several outstanding requests from people to build standalone jukeboxes, mythtv servers and NAS boxes but all the ones I've seen only have 2 bays and I don't want to use a full sized case. 6 drive bays would be ideal, that'd let me have a separate boot drive, 4 RAID 5 drives and a pool spare.

-- Gary F.

I avoided mentioning the Terastation b/c of the poster's <$300 stipulation. I've got two of them at the office. The gigabit ethernet is fantastic, and I think they're by far the price/performance leader if you're not into rolling your own. I use them for daily on-site warm backup and cross-wireless-bridge weekly offsite backups.

I don't use them for live file use, so I can't really comment about speed, but the few times I've needed yesterday's file back it's blinding fast (reads).

They're good looking and very quiet.

-Zeke

Oh that's tasty... that'd make a great media box. Any idea of the street price for that?

-- Gary F.

As I discussed in a different thread, I'm about to need a whole lot of home storage for Apple Lossless or FLAC files, so I'm looking at getting some kind of home RAID-5 box. I probably need ~600GB capacity, after formatting and whatnot. The Shuttle XPC solution, at least according to GamePC, only supports three hard drives, but they're probably reserving a slot for an optical drive. If you configure the system with four 250GB Maxtors and no optical drive, the price comes out to $2000, assuming you low-ball the graphics card.

Perhaps more attractive are the standalone NAS boxes. The two interesting choices, at least that I've been able to find are the Buffalo TeraStation and the Infrant ReadyNAS 600. The former comes fully configured for $1000, but people have many complaints. It doesn't support NFS, among other things. The ReadyNAS box costs $1400 with disks, but you can buy it bare-bones for $600 and add the disks yourself (probably another $500).

The NAS boxes seem to beat out the Firewire RAID controllers. You pay more money than the NAS solutions (assuming you want RAID 5), and you seem to get less flexibility.

Thoughts?

Well, here's my $.02.

You don't need very much processor power. If all you're using it for is to store music, you don't need much I/O throughput either! Even when you put your music on the server, the bottleneck is likely the encryption anyhow. So, forget about trying to make a high performance file server. It's just not necessary and you'll pay a premium for it.

I bought 3 320GB Western Digital drives from newegg for $135 each (after rebate). I use an old Pentium III machine and just put the latest Debian (on this group's recommendation), software RAID5 and Samba. I have 583GB of storage that I can drag&drop from Windoze. Its a big ugly machine, but it sits in a closet on a UPS and I never see it.

This whole thing took about an hour and a half to get going. I think that anybody who can use an empeg can get this going with an old computer they or someone they know have laying around. I just can't see spending the extra money on a prebuilt system like these NAS systems. I guess a Shuttle machine would look better, but who cares? Besides, cramming 3 disks in a small case will shorten their life because they will be right next to each other and run hotter.

My GF and I both use this thing all the time. We play files in Windows using Winamp at the same time. I've simultaneously uploaded new music to the server, synchronized my empeg, and had 2 computers playing music in Winamp (via Samba) and it has never lagged out. This is a measly P3-550Mhz.

I'm guessing that you have an old machine laying around that will do the trick. Stick it in a closet with an ethernet cable and forget about it. Before upgrading, I had 2 250GB drives in a software RAID0 configuration. I wanted the redundancy of RAID5 so I upgraded. The machine had run for over 400 days without a reboot or any attention whatsoever. The only reason it wasn't 600+ days is that I moved and needed to shut it off.

Spend the money you save on another disk, or on 100GB drives for your empeg!

FWIW,

Jim

The only "spare" machines I've got are some crusty beige-box PIII-500MHz's at the office, where one by one they've been failing and we've been scavenging parts to keep them going. That's not a good starting point for a RAID box...

Instead, I've decided to go with the Infrant ReadyNAS solution. For what it's worth, there's an AVS forum thread where they are organizing a "power buy" which will apparently get Infrant's next-generation "X-RAID" technology that will apparently be a standard feature in their products next month. The gist is that you can incrementally buy disks, plug them in, and their RAID controller does all the work.

The price on the power buy wasn't posted on AVS, but it's supposed to be posted on a private forum on Infrant's chat forum. As soon as I have numbers, I'll post them here for anybody else who may be interested.

Well, that is very nice indeed. I'd love to know what the numbers turn out to be. A friend of mine would like to get one.

Thanks,

Jim

Well, I'm now "in" the private forum, but they haven't posted any pricing data. What is clear is that you need to get "in" on the deal by Wednesday, and orders based on the deal need to be in by Friday. They may or may not post the prices before Wednesday. What you get, for what it's worth, is to be one of the first adopters of the sequel to the ReadyNAS 600. You get a "free" upgrade to 256MB of RAM and can pay for a further upgrade to 512MB. Likewise, you can buy the system bare or pre-populated with hard drives.

Well, you could install Solaris x86 instead. I've never had any (non-idiot-initiated) problems with their software RAID, including expanding filesystems.

Looks like their ReadyNAS 1000 actually has hot-swap disks. Of course, it's significantly more expensive. I keep bait-and-switching myself.