Dave Viner's Weblog

Need more space

I need to buy some new hardware for home use. Specifically, I need to get more storage space (for things like mp3s and miscellaneous files) and I need to start backing up my computers. I'd guess that I need at least 250 GB storage. I also have both a Mac and 2 winxp machines to backup. So the question is: what should I get?

After investigating, I think there are 2 general options for more storage:

• NAS


• External drive

As I understand it, an external drive is just a hard drive that's connected to one of my existing computers which offers tons more storage. The upside of this is that it's pretty easy to setup (just plug in a external hd to my desktop and start saving). Moreover, these are fairly inexpensive, like 300 GB Maxtor for around $250. The downside is that it's just a hard drive connected to my existing desktop - which means that it's only available if my desktop is running, it's only as fast as the network+the wire transfer time (from the desktop to the harddrive). (Usually I wouldn't worry about the second one, except my desktop is a bit old and I don't think it has USB2.0 or firewire available on the motherboard.)

On the other hand, NAS provides even greater storage capacity. But the price seems to be higher. For example, the Buffalo TeraStation which can handle 1 TB of storage costs $800. The upside of most NAS as far as I can tell is that they expand much more easily, the transfer time is limited to the network transfer time only.

I suppose a third option would be to rebuild an older desktop with some monster set of internal drives and just use that as the backup.

Of course, all of these options only solve the storage issue and not the backup issue - which would probably require some software or some rsync magic.

Any suggestions on what to get for storage or backup software?

Posted by dave at April 14, 2006 10:53 AM | TrackBack