External Harddisk/NAS search

[PPRuNeUser0211]

Ok gents time to pick the collective brain of PPrune again...

Lappie: 80gig
Passport drive 1:160gb
Passport drive 2:250gb

All full! Looking to get an external hard drive to leave at home base with the archive/library of tv/movies/music on and then use the 250gb drive for travelling.

So the search is for:
External hard drive
Network connectability highly desireable
RAID backup highly desireable
quietness essential (home base consist of a room! so I need to sleep with the thing so to speak...)
USB connection desireable (to connect said HDD to home cinema setup directly)
min capacity 750GB (after RAID backup, i.e. 1.5TB min actual size)
any optional internet access to my own files would be quite nice, to aid with mobility!

Am happy to consider NAS boxes that come sans hardrive and get some seperately. Answers on a postcard!

[hellsbrink]

Get one of these

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Drive+Bays/External+%28For+SATA+Drive%29/ICY+BOX+IB-NAS-4220-B++2x3.5%22+SATA+HDD+?productId=30150

and stick two of these

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Hard+Drives/Serial+ATA/1000GB+-+1TB+-+Seagate+Barracuda+ES.2+-+7%2C200RPM+-+32MB+?productId=29413

in it

[Saab Dastard]

Hellsbrink, that looks spot on! I wouldn't mind one myself - if I had the money!

pba_target, a word of warning - be VERY VERY careful about deleting files from a NAS.

For most SOHO NAS devices, user-deleted files will NOT be in a "wastebin" or recycler. They are gone. Period. Unless you go for professional data recovery.

There's a lot of good things about a NAS with RAID 1 or higher enabled. However, there are also lots of ways for a NAS to fail - both through mechanical failure and user error - with data loss the result. Do NOT regard it as an alternative to regular backups. Higher availability and convenience, yes.

SD

[Mac the Knife]

Dig a serviceable old PC out of the garage, install drives and FreeNAS - http://www.freenas.org/ - and off you go.

Much cheaper and more versatile than an off-the-shelf.

:ok:

[PPRuNeUser0211]

Saab -yep am aware of the deletion issue, but am confident that I won't delete owt by accident! Always use shift+del anyhoo!

As for regular backups, manage to keep about ten copies of stuff all over the place so not too much of a snag, just prefer to have one device that's reliable for day to day use, happy to use a wee little passport to keep the truly important stuff (eg photos) safely backed up elsewhere.

Mac, have considered the old pc issue as I have quite a few kicking about, but short of some re-investment in new silent psu & heatsink they'd be far too noisy for my current environment, and also a little on the large size (am somewhat space limited in my one room with all my outdoors gear!). Icybox looks a good solution, will probably go down that road I suspect.

(PS anyone know anything about how you go about recovering a RAID 1 array with a single disk failure, is it as simple as just cracking straight on from the copy disk?)

[Capt Pit Bull]

Steer clear of the Buffalo stuff. Looks good on paper, but ours has been very erratic.

pb

[Saab Dastard]

recovering a RAID 1 array with a single disk failure

The theory is that the data is all on the good disk, and when a replacement disk is installed, it should rebuild the mirror.

However, the practical reality is that it will depend very much on the implementation and specifics of the particular unit, such as whether it supports hot-swappable disks or not and whether it has to be taken off-line for recovery to occur. Performance would be degraded while rebuilding is done, even if on-line.

SD