Big hard disks?

[ffutures]

Further to all my recent questions about network storage, I'm beginning to think that using a 100gb drive is a short-term solution at best - to save a lot of faffing about I should get a bigger drive or drives from the outset.

Anyone know of any particularly good deals in the 250gb and up range? Needs to be ATA for compatibility reasons, there don't seem to be any affordable SATA network storage boxes around.

Comments

[uk-lemming.livejournal.com]

400Gb Seagate IDE for about £80 @ Ebuyer

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, that seems to be fairly typical.

Not settled down yet

[nojay.livejournal.com]

The home/small-office Network Attached Storage market hasn't really settled down to a standard set of features you expect any given box to supply yet. That means you have to provide your own laundry list of what the box needs to do for you and then pick and choose between the short list of contenders.

Speed: is 100baseT OK for you or is 1000baseT really desirable, necessary or worth having now for futureproofing? If you plan to use the NAS to supply data to multiple machines and multiple users, stream media or stuff like that then 1000baseT is a good idea but the gibabit Ethernet boxes are all quite expensive still.

Physical size: a lot of NAS boxes are very compact, to save space in a small office or home. It means they can be located in a cupboard to reduce noise, but that means they might only be able to have one drive internally. Quite a few units allow you to plug USB external drives into them to add to the capacity, but I've heard tales about incompatibilites in that area. As far as capacity is concerned, most boxes can be upgraded almost trivially. As you said almost all NASes are ATA, although you can now get cheap USB housings for SATA drives and these should work with the USB-drive NASes.

Printer: some of the newer NAS boxes offer a printer driver capability to allow you to network a dumb printer, but most don't.

Disc system formats: some NAS only do FAT32, some do Linuxy stuff, some do chunky NTFS. RAID -- personally I think most low-end RAID systems are bad news as they have interesting ways of going wrong on you, given the extra complexity, but mirror or stripe is usually available with 2-drive NASes.

Management: some NAS can do tricks like run Web servers, FTP servers etc. natively as well as offering SAMBA shares for regular local networking. Most NAS use a Web browser front-end for configuration and other management, a few also have a serial port that allows command-line hack-and-slash.

Decide what you want in terms of features then look for bargains within that wish-list. First thing to decide is do you really need a NAS right now, or would a couple of large external USB drives not be more useful and cheaper for the moment? I was told PC World were selling 320Gb Seagate USB drives for about 70 quid each recently.

Re: Not settled down yet

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

What I want to do is download mostly 350mb-ish files on one PC or another, save stuff to the big disk on the network, then grab files from it as needed, either copy the file across or open it using videolan. I'm thinking a basic 10/100 network drive box e.g. the one Maplin currently have for 35 quid, don't need incredibly high speed - I really don't plan to replace the router etc. any time soon.

Re: Not settled down yet

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Forgot to say that I may want to watch stuff from the laptop occasionally, e.g. in bed or out on the roof in summer, so USB is probably not ideal. Plus I've GOT a USB box with a small hard disk and I'm less than impressed with it, though that may be the PC I've mostly used it with rather than the drive itself.

WiFi

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Some NASes are WiFi-enabled but that adds to the cost. Unless you run a Cat5e line out onto the roof then streaming stuff from an NAS wirelessly is going to be a neat trick, assuming you mean to watch video on your laptop. Usually USB2.0 hard drives can stream H.264 video easily at 2-3Mb/second and a 100baseT NAS will easily cope with one (or maybe two) media streams of that kind.

You might consider just getting a bigger HD for your laptop and put all your media on that -- Fujitsu are releasing a 300Gb laptop drive in February if you're interested. External bus-powered USB drives that take laptop 2.5" HDs might be a better mobile alternative though.

Re: WiFi

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The router has WiFi and I've watched plenty of low-res stuff on the laptop via that route, if the speed isn't good enough for proper video (e.g. BSG episodes) I'd probably copy the file across then delete it afterwards, which I've done many times from one PC or another to the laptop.

For various reasons I prefer not to use a laptop for downloading - amongst other things there seem to be WiFi / Bittorrent problems here - but since I often use the laptop when neither PC is on line it makes sense to shove the files on a server rather than keeping them on one or another PC.

Re: WiFi

[uk-lemming.livejournal.com]

I've been able to watch most Videos of about that bitrate (350Mb or so in size and 45 Minutes long) over 54G wireless without a problem. The actual bitrate of Streamed AVI is relatively low for most networks. the problem comes when you stream DVD bitrate's over the Internet. MPEG has a really bad compression ratio compared to Xvid or DivX AVI.

[onyxhawke.livejournal.com]

I got a 500 gb from western digital fro $200 at Best Buy.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm in the UK, but prices don't seem to be too dissimilar here.