NAS Help

little advice if you would be so kind ladies and gents.

we bought a netgear SC101 and a couple of 400gb IDE disks a couple of years ago.

untill now its given reasonable (if slow and annoying) service, however, i came home tonight to it not working, and its given me a couple of hours of palpatations and stress trying to get data back off it.

as i now have my data off it, could someone give me some suggestions for a half decent NAS box.

dosent need to be anything fancy with servers and stuff built in, just a good reliable box that i can keep pictures and music on with it worrying about it dying and never been able to get the data off

cheers

an N299 thecus ?

GoNz0 is probably about right however at this point I really have to point out that if you're centralising all your files on a NAS you *really* need to be backing it up as well. And RAID is not a backup either.

yeah, i know, backup, backup, backup :(

what are peoples opinions on this??

also, whats the preffered way of making large scale backups, multiple DVD, or something like a 2.5" portable HDD?

Portable hard drive is a good cheap choice (either 3.5" or 2.5") but although it isn't connected all the time, it is still a mechanical device and there is always the risk that it won't work when you really need it.

DVD/blu ray is relatively cheap, and should have reasonably good longevity if you use good quality branded disks from a main stream mfr (Imation, TDK etc)

Next up the scale is something like the Tandberg RDX removeable storage system

http://www.tandbergdata.com/emea/en/.../rdx-quikstor/

Not used it myself, so can't comment on it.

Finally there is tape - good shelf life, reliable, high capacity - cheap media (bytes/£) but expensive to set up - drives aren't cheap, most are SCSI so you need to add a high end SCSI card to the cost.

BluRay is FAR from cheap as a backup medium.

Hard drives are cheaper per GB of storage, by quite a considerable margin.

£7 for 25GB BD-RE disk.
£28 for 250GB HDD

Quote:

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Originally Posted by shaithis

BluRay is FAR from cheap as a backup medium.

Hard drives are cheaper per GB of storage, by quite a considerable margin.

£7 for 25GB BD-RE disk.
£28 for 250GB HDD

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At the moment - Blu ray disks will drop in price - but there is still DVD.

In terms of media costs - tape is the cheapest - but capital costs are high. The TANDBERG RDX seems a good compromise.

Bottom line is that it depends on the value you put on your data

As the esteemed peterb says - it really depends on the value of your data and how quickly you would need data restoring in event of failure. I have a centralised fileserver which is backed up to a USB disk. The contents of the disk are then uploaded to Amazon S3 so I have onsite and offsite backups, and it's a pretty cheap setup.

yeah, i think i'm going to try and sort somethign like that out, just to stop my hair going grey next time!!

does anyone have any opinions on Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B as an alternative to the thecus box thats suggested?