OT: recommendations for networked drive?

[Gordon Henderson]

I may be a bit biased as a friend work for the company, but have you had a look at the Drobo?

Drobo itself is a USB device, but there is a NAS add-on which sits under it.

It's main feature is that it looks like a single large drive to the host, even though it might not have that physical disk capacity, so start off with a single 250GB drive, and it looks like a 2TB drive to the host. When the physical drive gets full (LEDs on the front tell you the 'real' capacity), then just slot in another drive. If it has enough drives, then it will automatically use mirroring/RAID over the drives too, so if you've filled it with 4 x 250GB drives, then you just pop one of the

250GB drives out and pop in a 500GB drive and it "just works", and so on.

They're not as cheap as just a drive in a box though, however if you need the capacity and flexability, they might be good for you...

The Drobo is, and it spins down the disks when not in-use too.

Gordon

[unopened]

You might want to look at the Excito 'Bubba' (Yes, that really is the name).

It is a tad expensive at first sight but:

1) It is fanless, so extremely quiet 2) It uses less than 10 Watts of power. 3) It is designed to be on 24x7 3) It is small.

You can replace the hard drive. They do sell just the server without drives if you want to add your own from day one.

The parsimonious use of power pays dividends as it keeps your electricity bill down. Using a 100 W PC as a server for a year will take 100x24x365=3D876 kWh, which at roughly 10p per kWh is =A387.60. The 'Bubba's running costs would be 1/10 of that.

It uses Linux as it's operating system, but pre-set up, so you don't need to be a guru. That said, if you want to experiment, you can.

Alternatively, you could look at using a Linksys NSLU2, to which you add external USB drives. If you go hard-core, it is possible to replace the Linksys supplied operating system with Linux and do more with it - see .

Finally, as other people have suggested, the Buffalo Linkstation is a possibility as well. That too can use Linux, if you so wish.

Sid

[jkn]

I built an external networkable drive using one of these 'bridge boards' from Span:

gives you an Ethernet port *and* a USB port. I used an old metal external CD-ROM drive case, which easily fits the board and a Hard Disk, and has its own internal power supply (I hate 'wall warts' - it's very pleasing to be able to plug an IEC cable into this). There's even a small fan in the case, although I have disconnected this.

The board itself costs about 30 quid including p&p etc, and you could probably find a similar case via freecycle if you're a cheapskate ;-). It has ftp and samba on it, and allows you to set a drive spindown time etc. The drive has to be VFAT formatted which might be an issue for you.

I also use FreeNAS on other Linux boxes, but this fits a useful niche for me - and it's partly DIY!

HTH J^n