Terabyte NAS
When will it finally be feasible to purchase this Infrant NV+ for home use? Will hard drive technology catch up to our increasing media requirements so that we can grab one of these boxes and be able to back up a bunch of stuff (acounting for loss of space for raid 1 or 5)? Or will economies of scale and increasingly connected world make online storage and backup services a reality for us in the future?
I’d prefer cheap terabyte drives to online, I’m much more comfortable keeping things local - so I don’t have any privacy concerns nor do I have to worry that if things go wrong and I can’t access the internet, I still have access to my files. But it seems like every new generation of drives comes because we needed it to handle the volume of our media, so buying a large drive now works for a very small period of time and buying more than you need is a bit of a pricey venture. 2TB would serve me admirably for the foreseeable future (which translates to 1-1.5mb usable), but do I really want to shell out close to $2000?
February 22nd, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Rick has one of these. He bought it without disks for $580 and then added 4x 500gb SATA disks to it @ $111 each, if I recall correctly. The nice thing about this is that you could start with two disks, mirrored and the darn thing will relayout all by itself when you add the third and fourth disks. Neat.
February 22nd, 2007 at 5:36 pm
BTW: my personal data system works like this:
old 400mhz g4 mac in kitchen (that is my radio/stereo, bittorrent, big download, ssh gateway and fileserver) has 2×250GB disks in in it. These are rsynced to my dreamhost account nightly. Dreamhost == $24/mo for 585GB of disk that can be webdav OR ftp/sftp/http, but not both. I use MacFUSE+sshfs to mount my backup directory on dreamhost as a local filesystem, which seems to work better.
In the future I will work it out so that the rsync will run at 1am and stop itself at 7am… right now it runs and runs if there is a big delta in the dataset.
But I want one of those NASes. You can apparently hook a certain model of USB 802.11 widget to it and make a subset of the data (or all of it) available via wireless as well. What I really want is the new 802.11n Apple Airport (which has nice sounding NAS funcitonality) to work really really well, but the jury is still out at this point.