STORAGE OPTIONS...

i’m at the point where i’ll soon have to buy another pair of mirrored external drives and i’m casting about for something better … namely a RAID5 enclosure, 3 or 4 bays, either NAS or DAS.

would love to hear from anyone who has already gone that route and has any recommendations.

i’ve pretty much ruled out the drobo on account of the usb2. currently leaning towards the ReadyNAS NV+ but i dont especially need the network aspect and would love to find something comparable with a direct eSATA connection. Thecus N3200 is a possibility…

any thoughts on this dull but inevitable topic more than welcome!

by david sutherland at Sun Apr 27 14:53:08 UTC 2008 (ed. Apr 28 2008) London, United Kingdom | Bookmark this | Digg this |

http://www.lightstalkers.org/need-help-in-building-a-redundant-storage-device

i just realized you contributed to that old post.

i am enjoying my pc with built in raid array, as i just got a new laptop i am going to install bsd on the pc and set it up as a dedicated file server.

i think peoples bashing of usb2 is unmerited, its really damn fast.

granted it might have slightly slower response times and slower rates for multiple files but it is still way more then useable. especially if you are just looking for storage.

you won’t actually be working out of the drobo, just storing files on it and grabbing the odd one for editing.

if you were going to run a web server from a drobo i would recommend something else but it makes perfect sense for file storage.

a good deal of these technologies are just marketing buzz, think about what you really need.

by s. b. ramin | 27 Apr 2008 15:04 | Vancouver, Canada |

hi sascha, thanks for that link – i was looking for that post but couldn’t find it, didn’t turn up in my search.

there’s a lot of useful info there and a few good words about the ReadyNAS NV+ (now rebadged netgear) which seems to do everything the drobo does but cheaper and faster.

the drobo’s problem is not just in the usb2 interface, but a data bottleneck in the architecture so that 10-15mbs is about all you can expect. yes, i could use it just for storage and work off the internals, but gigabit ethernet should be fast enough to work from so why not…

by david sutherland | 28 Apr 2008 10:04 | London, United Kingdom |