I'm toying with buying some storage for files, films etc at home. Maybe something like a NAS which I believe if I hook it up to my wireless router I can stream films / pictures to compatable TV's. For redundancy I'm told that its better to get two separate drives that fit into a housing so basically back everything up onto the two separate drives incase one fails. So I was thinking of getting something like x2 2 terabyte drives, 2 terabytes should give me plenty of storage for films, TV shows, pics etc shouldn't it. So what brands / types do you recommend?
External hard drives fitted with an RJ45 (ethernet) connector are horribly expensive. A cheaper alternative would be to connect one or two drives via either eSATA or USB to a NAS adaptor such as Addionics NAS 4 adaptor. This supports NTFS, FAT-32 and several Unix file systems including XFS, EXT3 and EXT4 - it is the only adaptor that supports Linux. It also supports WebDAV. The adaptor costs US$89 or so direct from Addionics website (they do have UK representation but none of those yet stock this latest device).
They are not cheap Sean, looks like a very good idea though, I would love to have one with the Gigabit Ethernet connection. Sorry for the very late reply Stu, I should know about these storage options but oddly I have not got that kind of storage myself. Personally I would be looking for a device that gave me RAID 1 (mirrored disks) as a minimum and I would want a Gigabit Ethernet interface too, anything slower and the transfer times are too painful for day to day use, however I don't have any recommendations at this time.
My previous employer, who was in the business of storing and transmitting large quantities of data used RAID 1 systems to ensure that they didn't lose the data if one of the hard discs failed. Seemed to work well.
RAID 1 is pretty simple, there are other options with striped arrays that allow for fault tolerance as well however I have seen supposedly fault tolerant RAID array's completely fail when a hard drive failed, fortunately the data on those arrays was backed up to tape but it was disappointing that the advertised 'oh just plug in a replacement drive and let the array rebuild itself' didn't work when it came to the crunch.
Thanks for the replies folks and apologies for the late reply from me but life has been a bit mental lately and this storage thing is on hold at the mo but I'll definately be looking at all your suggestions when time allows. Cheers again
Our lot have started to use a Google Drive system. Basically cloud storage. Interesting to see how it goes. This describes it pretty accurately. "Google Drive offers all users an initial 15 GB (originally 5 GB) of online storage space, usable across three of its most-used services: Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos (aka Picasa Web Albums). A user can get additional storage, which is shared between Picasa and Google Drive, from 100 GB up to 16 TB through a paid monthly subscription plan (US$4.99 per month for 100 GB). A user with any paid storage does not get any free storage along with the paid storage." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Drive Nice thing is that one can access it from anywhere where there is an internet connection. Accessible by desktop, laptop, tablet and even by smart phone if need be and any one device. Ideal for those that use more than one device over the course of their lives and are on the move a lot. And a good way to share files that are too big to email.
Having stuff in a data cloud is a great idea for corporates whose users may be anywhere in the world. But I would not trust Google with any information that could be commercially sensitive or in any way confidential, for reasons that Mr Snowden would be only too familiar with. I admit I've not looked into Google Drive - or any of the other cloud providers such as Amazon - but it would not surprise me if, in their Ts&Cs, there are restrictions on data encryption.
We are using it to archive documentation that is useful to us but of no real value to anyone else. No trade secrets being stored on it.
If its historical archiving, why not simply set up your own password protected private server? It might be cheaper in the long run and probably more efficient too.
Not sure what you mean? We have a server but access to the server, remotely, has been an issue. The cloud based Google Drive gets around this. I read and write directly to / from the cloud.
GOOGLE DRIVE: ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES "Google drive not only lets you store your data securely but activities like sharing, editing etc has also been made easy. This service liberates user from the use of a variety of software so as to open different file formats. Drive supports about 20 different file formats, so various file formats could be opened directly into the browser without installing the related application program. Drive services comes in two versions: Free: which gives up to 5GB data storage Premium: This gives from 25GB to 16TB online data storage on monthly rental. Some advantages of Google drive are: Live changes: Users can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. and can edit the same over internet. This provides a real-time working experience on the document, as if editing the document in local machine. It also saves the changes made on the document at the same time. Anytime accessibility: Files and documents stored in the data centers of Google can be accessed by a user while sitting in any part of the world, by simply logging into their Google drive account. Corporations have gained enterprise mobility dues to this reason Device independency: There is no specific platform defined for using the file uploaded on Google’s drive. Any device, which is connected to network, can be used to access the file stored on drive. Integration: Documents stored on Google drive can easily be opened in any other Google app. This provides a better integration of this service with other cloud applications, so as to provide hassle-free experience to the user. Ease of Searching: Documents can easily be searched for, using Google Drive service. Text can also be searched, even from images using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. It’s an intelligent way of searching for the text even in the image files. Limitless file size sharing: Sharing has been made easy among a specified group of people as special editing permissions can be given to them. Moreover, the storage limit has also been increased from a few MBs to a few GBs. Users can share any size of the file without any limit to any specific file size. With a number of advantages, certain security and privacy issues have also been highlighted in Google drive service. Some of them are listed below: Google holds the authority to index your data, stored on Google drive. So in case, some keyword matches with any title of you photograph, some text in you document etc. could float in the search result. Internet based service means full dependency on internet to access the data. As, data is stored remotely so some connection is required to access the data. In case of a scenario where the Internet isn’t functioning, access to your data in such situation becomes impossible. Google Drive provides an easy solution for online back-up of data to the users. In emergency situations like hard drive crash or data corruption, Google drive provides great help to the users because of the availability of all time data back-up for the users. " http://www.evancarmichael.com/Technology/6726/Google-Drive-Advantages-and-disadvantages.html
