Networked storage space?

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I'm looking to get some sort of storage space for my house's network. It needs to be at least a terabyte with as good a transfer speed as is reasonable to purchase. I'd prefer if it could be connected directly to the network, rather than going through some one's computer specifically.

Of course I'm hoping to find the best deal, but I'm curious what sort of options folks can recommend. Can an external hard drive connect to a networked printer and run independently? would a hard drive enclosure be preferable with good old fashion internal drives (is there an advantage to this over using external)? building a server is an option, but ultimately we just want a place to dump massive amounts of pictures, files, and random other crap, and a server may be too many bells and whistles for what I'm after.

anyone have any experience on this? any advice?

[Eomer]

Personally I just have a 750gb RAID5 array built into my main desktop computer. It's not a server or anything. It's worked flawlessly for me. Only downside is that the RAID controller somewhat sucks, and the write speeds are atrocious. But read speeds are better than a single HD.

I'd be curious to see if there was some sort of cheap server option out there, though. Just a small enclosure you connect to your network and manage remotely that you can tuck away somewhere.

[Twobit Whore]

You could just build a cheap machine with no frills and fill it with drive space, connect it to your router and set up a small home network. You wouldn't need a powerful CPU or GPU to run a simple box for storage.

Or you could look into a NAS (Network Acces Storage) unit.

Amazon.com: Linksys Network Storage System with 2 Bays (NAS200): Electronics

This may be your ideal option: Newegg.com - Western Digital WDG1NC10000N 1TB Home Network Storage with Remote Access - Network Storage (NAS)

1TB of space with an Ethernet connection.

[Radahr Manasponge]

I just built a server PC out of spare parts, and filled it up with drives. Run three RAID-Mirrors hosting drive space, with some simple monitoring scripts to let me know if something starts to get wonky/fail outright.

I'm around 1.5 terabytes of 'live' space, and then I also have three 500ish gig external sata drives that I do an 'offline dump' one a week or so and then power down the external when the copy is done.

I usually dual-boot with whatever flavor of winders (now bouncing between 2k3 and 2k8 beta) and some linux distro (most recently ubuntu).

[Manseed]

Originally Posted by Radahr Manasponge

I'm around 1.5 terabytes of 'live' space, and then I also have three 500ish gig external sata drives that I do an 'offline dump' one a week or so and then power down the external when the copy is done.

My porn is that good too.

[Cynno]

I support the ReadyNAS product for Netgear.

If you don't know what the fuck you're doing, please don't buy one and call me asking to have your hand held setting up a Raid 5 volume.

It's not very user friendly, but it does the job it was meant for rather well.

[Grundie]

You might consider something along these lines as well: Datto Backup - Home

It's just a NAS, an overpriced one, but it also ofers bitwise offsite backups of anything you put on the NAS. Comes in handy when your wife/girlfriend finds your porn and burns your house down. Only goes up to 500GB though so might be too small for your needs.

[Vorph]

If you have the knowledge, some spare hardware laying around, and a good RAID controller, it's far cheaper to build your own NAS box using something like OpenSUSE than it is to buy a pre-made solution.

[Sealody]

I'm running FreeNAS, do a search, it's (duh) Free... hehe.

It's on an ancient AMD 3200+ CPU with almost 4TB of storage attached. It's not mission critical stuff tho. Movies, Videos, Pictures, etc... but nothing that cannot be replaced. I've been running it for awhile and have never had any issues with FreeNAS, but wither you'll trust it with your data, (because it is free/lite) it's your choice. Again, I have not had a single issue with it.

If you have the hardware and knowledge, building your own Linux NAS would have alot more upsides. You can then run your own servers ontop of just NAS to make things even easier. Like your own MediaServer to stream some of those video/music to your other capable devices without dealing with windows.

Toss a 2nd NIC in and do away with your router. Make it a live internet-able machine where you can serve whatever is allowed from your ISP to the world. I'm on FIOS so bandwidth isn't an issue at all. Again, only if you truely know what you're doing and feel confident to have a live internet machine.. =)

[Wolfen]

I use the LaCie 1TB Ethernet Big Disk. Up until now it has worked great, but it stopped working tonight. I think it's the power supply and not the drive. /crosses fingers

[Rhuobhe]

Originally Posted by Manseed

My porn is that good too.

Haha jackpot.

[spronk]

tbh you may wanna really consider whether you want external storage or not. It drives up your power bill, its another shitty hot box (with all the attached problems of dust, pet hair, wife tripping over, etc), and frankly read/write speeds still suck over a gigabit network. i had at one point 5 PCs spread out around the house (media center, mainPC, webPC, storagePC, laptop) and I've consolidated it down to just 2 now (mainPC, laptop) and 10x happier.

It really is a lot easier just buying a bigass case, getting a nice big fan/cooling solution/etc to keep it chill, and filling it with 1TB SATA drives (< $200 and falling). I've got 4TB in my PC at the moment and happy as a clam. Took fucking forever to reinstall apps and copy shit from all over. I do keep a 2nd PC powered off most of the time, just turn it on to backup documents, music, and of course the very, very good porn.

[Furism]

I just bought a Synology DS207+ with two 500 Gb hard drives in RAID-1. That means I only have 500 Gb of storage even with two disks, but if one dies, the data is safe on the other disk - I just need to buy a new drive and the NAS will automatically copy the data on it.

Hell, it even supports ADS so I can use my home Active Directory access management directly on the NAS. I doubt you'll use this feature, though, as people who ask about NAS on a MMO forum don't usually have a Domain Controller.

Anyway, it also supports iTune, FTP, Apple Talk and you can even host a damn website on it since it obviously has a web and database server. You can configure it from a browser or a software. You can even stream data to your PS3/X360 from it.

This is what you need. Listen to me.