Thread: FANTASTIC New Toy

It looks like an excellent toy but if you can stick 4 or more 1TB SATA drives in your PC wouldn't that save you a whole heap of cash?

I'm gonna have about 700GB, (twin 360s) in my new one, (eventually).

Originally Posted by HangOver

It looks like an excellent toy but if you can stick 4 or more 1TB SATA drives in your PC wouldn't that save you a whole heap of cash?

I'm gonna have about 700GB, (twin 360s) in my new one, (eventually).

Means you don't have to muck around with backup space
RAID0/1/5 on a headless computer, fast to boot, very easy to manage, good data security
Cross system compatable (for when I get a Mac)
Will last for several years as its only disks and doesn't need the "latest" stuff (Buffalo is actually a 266MHz PowerPC chipped motherboard!)
Easily accessible to all PC's on the network (or only 1) depending on what's required.

My next PC (Desktop) will have mirrored C: disks (High speed) and 2 scratch disks for photo video editing, but I don't need lots of storage, just multiple spindles for speed. All my storage is via NAS unit and easily expandible.

Much better buy than USB drives or putting storage only drives in PC.

That said I now travel with a 250GB WD Passport drive for my Laptop. It's brilliant!

What he said

Originally Posted by HangOver

It looks like an excellent toy but if you can stick 4 or more 1TB SATA drives in your PC wouldn't that save you a whole heap of cash?

You would, but you'd lose the flexibility a separate NAS gives you.

Backup for the PC, media server for the squeezebox. Kiss player, etc (And perfect when you have more than one of the above, like I do) plus less to go wrong, cheaper to run than leaving a PC/Server on 24x7 and usually faster access than connecting another PC via a home network to the drives on your main PC (Though this last one only applies to a decant NAS box with it's own processor and lots of memory).

Originally Posted by jik22

Will be interested to see how you get on with yours...if you could time some big file copies (Say 4.7GB DVD ISO or similar) over the wire when you get a chance, that would be helpful.

G'day jik22,

Just copied over an uncompressed DVD I ripped (not in ISO format, still in original VIDEO_TS etc. format) - 8.54Gb worth - took roughly 16 minutes.

To complete the scenario though some details:

The PC is running Vista 64 Home Premium Edition.
The PC has Sophos Antivirus running on it.
The network is 1Gb.
The ReadyNAS NV+ has 3 x 500Gb drives in its 'RAID-X' configuration - additional speed could probably be gained by adding an extra drive (ReadyNAS NV+ can hold a maximum of 4 drives).

Based on the above I would say it transferred at roughly 546Mb a minute:

8.54Gb * 1024 (to give me the figure in Mb's) / 16 (to give me the transfer rate per minute).