advice on Storage

[scorpio05678]

Hi

I need advice on what to get for storing HDD Ghost images and incremental folder backups because

I have f***ed my laptop because of full HDD encryption requirements from my work. The OS partation is good but data partation is gone for good.

I need something which can connect to my BT hub(Lan/USB), have good security, reasonable storage (500GB+), reliable and upgradable in future. I use XP pro 32 bit for work and Vista ultimate 64 bit for personal.

I am planning to use Norton Ghost 9.0 to create an image of HDD and then weekly incremental/full backups of my work. I will also use it as archive for my personal stuff.

I know it's lots to ask but i have learnt my lesson and happy to invest some money now.

Thanks

SC

[burble]

What's your budget? I do my backups at home onto a 1Tb Buffalo Terastation Pro,.

BTW, looking at your sig, it's a Xeon cpu, not a Xenon

[scorpio05678]

it is a typo anything below £ 500 would be good.

[b0ned0me]

How about one of these?. 1.5TB if you use it JBOD, 750gb if you set it to RAID. Just shy of £400. The 1TB flavour is on Today Only at £217.38 at the mo. So you could either get your 500gb of secure storage for half your budget, or possibly pick up a pair and still be under £500. Then you could mirror them, or keep one in your office, or whatever you like.

[scorpio05678]

How about one of these?. 1.5TB if you use it JBOD, 750gb if you set it to RAID. Just shy of £400. The 1TB flavour is on Today Only at £217.38 at the mo. So you could either get your 500gb of secure storage for half your budget, or possibly pick up a pair and still be under £500. Then you could mirror them, or keep one in your office, or whatever you like.

What RAID config it has/support (if any)? doesn't say in the tech specs

SC

[burble]

0 & 1 I think.

[b0ned0me]

Actually I think it's just JBOD and 1, from what I have read. Not 100% sure what the difference between RAID 0 and JBOD is, but I think RAID 0 has a modicum of intelligence built in that speeds up performance, whereas JBOD is effectively two disks joined together with virtual duct tape.

Have a read of the various reviews etc and see what you think. They are cheap as chips, that's for sure.

[burble]

JBOD will 'join' together discs of any size to create a single volume. RAID 0 will too to some extent but if you have a 300GB and a 500GB disc in RAID0 then you'd only get 600Gb of storage (twice the smallest volume).

[scorpio05678]

i am looking for RAID 0,5 and 0+1 to get some fault tolerence build in. i need something i can rely on.

SC

[burble]

The Buffalo Terastations will do RAID 5, I'm running one here at home and haven't had any issues at all with it. It'll also do RAID 1 or RAID 0.

[b0ned0me]

i am looking for RAID 0,5 and 0+1 to get some fault tolerence build in. i need something i can rely on.

Why RAID 0? 5 or 1 will give you some bad disk protection, but RAID 0 does chuff-all other than speed things up while marginally increasing the risk of something going bad. Even on gigabit, the network (or possibly the storage controller) will be the bottleneck - you're realistically never going to see any effect from RAID 0.
RAID 1 will mirror the drives, giving some fault tolerance. RAID 5 will use a parity disk, giving a smaller amount of capacity loss, but with only two drives, that still works out to half the available disks - so no difference, apart from possibly a bit slower performance (but probably enough to make a difference when hooked up to a 100mb hub). RAID 5 only makes sense if you are going for a 3+ drive solution - things like the aforementioned Terastation, the Netgear ReadyNAS, Thecus 4100 or 5100 etc.

Don't know if you have come across smallnetbuilder.com - they have a reasonably informative NAS section and some good reviews.

[scorpio05678]

hey guys

thanks for the suggestions but situatuion have changed.

I had my laptop reghosted by my work people and now it has HDD encryption software as a part of base image. so i won't be able to ghost my HDD as it will be encrypted with OS. Ghost will not be able to recognise the drive when it will boot in DOS mode.

I already have 300 GB external usb so i just use that for file backup.

Thanks

SC

[b0ned0me]

I had my laptop reghosted by my work people and now it has HDD encryption software as a part of base image. so i won't be able to ghost my HDD as it will be encrypted with OS. Ghost will not be able to recognise the drive when it will boot in DOS mode.

Yeah, we're getting that soon. I'm looking forward to it immensely. They've promised it won't break any of the software we use or degrade performance. Hmmmmm....

[scorpio05678]

So far no issues with software but there is a small performance hit and it doesn't allow laptop to Hibernate.

have fun

SC

[b0ned0me]

So far no issues with software but there is a small performance hit and it doesn't allow laptop to Hibernate.

Oh that's just brilliant, that is. It's not like having a laptop hibernate is anything useful
Which solution are your guys using? We are apparently going with PGP Corporation.