Recently I've been researching NAS (network attached storage) and came across two products that look pretty darned cool and are budget friendly....


Synology DS211J - $209
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...8-065-_-Product

Comes with no HDs installed. Has 2 bays so you can run it as a mirrored raid if you want redundancy or 1 big raid disk. You can attached it to your router and you're good to go. What's really neat is you can do a whole lot more with it then you might expect.

See here...
http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS211j/index.php

Also check out the live demo of the built in software...
http://www.synology.com/enu/products/demo/index.php

Cool!


Also, for drives, how can you go wrong with a WD 2 TB for $89? Runs cooler with greenpower technology

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6-514-_-Product


Pop 2 of these babies into your Synology DS211J and you've got a low-power, web accessible, network accessible storage solution that'll work great be it Mac or PC. Hell, you can even host a web site on it. Total price is $387.

Also, check out Carbonite, Amazon S3 or BackBlaze for offsite backup over the web.

http://www.carbonite.com
http://aws.amazon.com/s3
http://www.backblaze.com

Careful with the 2 TB drives. There are generally higher failure rates for the biggest drives in production at any point and 2 TB is out at the bleeding edge right now. Lots of reports of abnormally high failures with 2TB drives.

Yup-My 1 1/2 bit the dust. Good thing the latest job was done and it was still new enough to be under warranty. It bites though that I have to wait 3 weeks for the new one....

All the more reason to run a Raid 0. That way you've got 2TB of space and it is redundantly written to a second drive. If one drive fails, you still have your data. If both fail, you're screwed (e.g. fire, theft). That's why, if you're concerned about it, you might consider an offsite backup...

http://www.carbonite.com
http://aws.amazon.com/s3
http://www.backblaze.com

2 TB Seagaate Barracuda Green - $99 about the same price

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...8-681-_-Product

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822155009

This sweetheart was $70 on sale earlier this year. Loaded it with 2 WD Green 2TB drives and she's setup for RAID 0

The WDs were on sale for $59 after a $20 rebate.

For less than $200 total I was quite pleased.

What are you using those for, Justin - back-up?

Otherwise you don't want "green" drives, because they save energy by going to sleep in the middle of your recording.

Also, if I were going attach a stand-alone drive to the network I'd use one of my routers with a USB port. Or just use one of my PCs, which are worth about $50 each nowadays.

Meanwhile, I'm not any more afraid of 2TB drives than any others. I trust none of them but use them all.

Yes. I just re-purpose old computers for storage and as servers. They are cheaper - and can do a whole lot more than a dumb NAS can.

But saying you trust (or inversely "don't trust") a new, 2TB drive just as much as smaller capacity drives is plain silly. Statistically, the failure rate for 2TB drives is far greater than say, the average 500 GB drive.

The problem is that statistically they're also a lot more convenient for fools like me who store lots of huge sample libraries. So in my main Mac I have one 2TB, two 1TBs, and the system drive - in addition to an army of external ones.

It's insane.

But the truth is that drives don't usually fail, even if they're 2TB. Unfortunately it's a big PITA when they do.

" you don't want "green" drives, because they save energy by going to sleep in the middle of your recording."



Almost as bad as when your "green" electrolux car runs out of battery on your way to get a six-pack of beer.