[danbrew]

Anybody using the "Link Station Network Storage Center" from Buffalo Tech? It appears to be a SAN type solution and is reasonably inexpensive. I wish it had a larger hard drive, but you can connect another drive to it via USB 2.0 to expand the capacity.

http://www.buffalotech.com/wireless/...HDH120LAN.html

Comments appreciated.

[Partisan01]

Originally posted by danbrew:
Anybody using the "Link Station Network Storage Center" from Buffalo Tech? It appears to be a SAN type solution and is reasonably inexpensive. I wish it had a larger hard drive, but you can connect another drive to it via USB 2.0 to expand the capacity.

http://www.buffalotech.com/wireless/...HDH120LAN.html

Comments appreciated.

My experience with SANs is redundency and fail-safe. Looking at the site it appears as if there isn't any RAID involved in that box. You can roll out a RAID solution pretty cheap. I'm working on a RAID-5 solution at my place with some old sun hardware, i have 2 9gig drives and a 18 gig drive for the parity drive.

If you're not interested in redundency I would recommend just getting a FW external drive and hooking it up to a comp and sharing it on the network. For the price of that thing you could probably clear house with 250gigs+. Let us know what you end up doing.

ndt

[fizzlemynizzle]

That's a NAS solution, not SAN. SANs are built on fibre-channel connectivity.. the Buffalo product is just a piece of storage that connects to your LAN.

It's probably not very fast and certainly not redundant, but if you have a lot of computers on your network that share data and you can't afford a file server it could be a solution.

[danbrew]

thanks for the corrections - NAS vs. SAN, you're right, it's a NAS. My challenge is that I have five or six devices, Macs and PCs, and I would like to have some type of ethernet backup solution. why ethernet? I suppose so that I don't have to use one of my computers as a backup device.

It would be nice if large tape solutions were relatively inexpensive - but I don't want to spend thousands on a tape solution.

I use Retrospect as a backup solution and would prefer an "always on" backup solution. Hmmm... I suppose I could turn an old server into a storage device and throw a bunch of drives at it. Does anyone have recommendations for a good RAID hardware solution? Type of card, type of drives?

thanks - danbrew

[Scotttheking]

Originally posted by danbrew:
Does anyone have recommendations for a good RAID hardware solution? Type of card, type of drives?

thanks - danbrew

Linux box.
Get an old P2 or P3 as the CPU.
Get a 3ware raid card, they come in 2, 4, 8, or 12 drive cards, and they have PATA and SATA ones.
Get some drives of the size you want. Get all the same model, and I recommend ordering at once just to make sure they are the same.
Set up the array, go raid5, maybe with a hot spare.
You can setup linux for SMB, NFS, appletalk, or all.
Then set retrospect to back up to it, or use something like flexbackup to handle the backups.

This is what I'm planning to setup at home.