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

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.