Need Advice on Storage

Hello,

I am looking for advice on an external storage solution. I have a small LAN for my home and home office (1 W2K server and 6 XP desktops). I have 200GB of photos, videos and mp3s that are currently stored on one of the desktops. I would like to move these files (which will no doubt grow to 400GB within a couple of years) off of the PC and onto networked storage.

I thought I had a solution when I purchased a 1 TB Maxtor Shared Storage II NAS for $500. This device has 2 500GB drives that I mirrored with RAID 1. After a few short weeks of working fine, I was shocked to see that the NAS' RAID had a failure. Contacting Maxtor I was told to immediately get my files off the device and to reconfigure the RAID setting. This would cause me to lose all of my data and would force me to start over again. I thought the whole idea of RAID 1 was redundancy and data protection. I have little confidence in this device and am planning on returning it soon (thank g-d for Costco's liberal return policy).

After doing some reading I found an article that said SOHO operations should avoid NAS devices with RAID (unless you go with high-end units that have hot swappable drives, dual power supplies, etc.). They recommend creating redundant discs with two separate networked drives. Use drive 1 as the primary storage drive and drive 2 as the backup for drive 1. This way, if drive 1 ever fails I just need to change the IP address of drive 2 to match drive 1 and I am back up and running. Any data lost between the daily backups and failure would be minimal to none because of how I would use the drives.

My challenge is every where I look manufacturers like Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital seem to be pushing NAS over networked drives. I don't want the over head of the RAID controller that comes with NAS. I essentially want a couple of fast but dumb 500GB drives that happen to have a gigabit Ethernet port on them. The drives must also allow one drive to back itself up to the other. Ideally, I could format them in NTFS as well.

Does anyone have any recommendations? I am hoping to find reliable drives from a name brand that cost $250 or less each.

Thanks for your help and suggestions!

 

Another thought

Here is another idea that just occurred to me. Western Digital sells its My Bookâ„¢ Premium ES Edition drive for $150. This is a 500GB external direct attach storage drive with an E-SATA interface. I believe that e-SATA at 3GB/s would be three times faster than my 10/100/1000 network. I could buy two of these devices and connect them to the same PC using Adaptec RAID 1225SA ($75). This RAID card lets you mirror two external e-SATA drives. This whole solution would cost $400 with cables. It sounds great, but which is more reliable:

1. Backing up one drive to another once a day (when files only change once a week or so) or

2. Mirroring two drives together?

Any thoughts on this idea? Thanks!

 

I was going to make the same suggestion (Windows Home Server ), but was unsure if having two servers would cause network issues.

 

Hi Arie and Dennis,

Thank you both for the interesting suggestion. I started looking into the HP MediaSmart Server EX475. It seems to have some really nice features. A unit with two 500GB drives will sell for $750. This is a bit more than I wanted to spend though. Also, it appears their client will not run on W2K, so I could not use it to backup my two servers.

Speaking of HP, I have an HP desktop that went dead on me. It is relatively new (2 years old) with a 2GHz+ Intel CPU, 2GB RAM and a nice size drive. I was having problems with it 6 months ago when I tried to use the internal drive to backup tv shows that were recorded on a DVR. In other words, I killed it due to pilot error.

Assuming I can get the box to work again, which would be the subject of another post, would you recommend I use this PC and purchase the retail version of MS Home Server? Doing so would cost $180 for the MS software and perhaps another $250 for the second internal drive.

Would I be able to use this home-made server to backup my W2K server?

 

Different Options

I was in the Beta for WHS, and it's a good solution and I have it hooked up at home. At my office I have a SBS server, with onboard RAID 5, as well as a Drobo. I use the onboard RAID for local files, OS, etc. I use the Drobo as a shared drive for the 3 of us in the office. We have a very "loose" environment - lots of music and personal files that take up space. The Drobo has been great for this, we ran out of space and just dropped in a new HDD and upgraded the capacity in a minute.

So far I haven't had any problems with this setup, the RAID 5 came preconfigured, so I hope I don't have any problems with it, I have no clue. The Drobo took me all of 5 minutes to setup, it was pretty easy.

Eddie.