Just bought a NAS server

http://www.buffalo-technology.com/products/network-storage/linkstation/linkstation-pro-duo/

It's slow, only 10MB per second, whereas the faster ones are upto 25MB per second. However, they cost the same without 2 500GB drives as this does, so I went for cheap and slow rather than expensive and fast.

It's a 2X500GB drive system with either striping or mirroring. I decided to use mirroring, which gives me fault tolerance but only 500GB space, which is more than I need. With all of my collected stuff from 20 years of computing weighing in at 30GB, I have plenty of room to grow.

I like it! I really really like it, so now I can bin the 2 ATA and 2 SCSI drives plus PCI ATA and SCSI160 controllers. It should make for a cleaner PC overall.

Oh, and just to make it Blitz related, so it doesn't get deleted like every other thread I start. I am housing my entire Blitz projects directory on it as well. So there....

lol paranoid...how much ££ $$ ?

>lol paranoid...how much ££ $$ ?

Yeah...

about £190 in Denmark, and remarkably about the same in the UK, while cheaper in the US...

I also bought a new router and a printserver(which is a dog to setup), so I really was on a spending spree this month. But the added flexibility will be worth it.

Its great having a centralized solution.

I built my own mini server out of a Via Artigo (about the same price but is a full 'PC' rather than a dedicated 'box') running ubuntu server. I looked at this kind of thing at the time but was put off because of the lack of LDAP & IMAP mail (I wanted all my pop3 email, email folders and contacts in the same place as well as files. I also needed a mini mock-web apache server for development too. It also allows me SSH access to my network or mail from outside my lan.

Looks like a good file side solution for the price though esp. because of the raid. Any idea if it supports NFS?

>Looks like a good file side solution for the price though esp. because of
>the raid.

My thoughts exactly.

>Any idea if it supports NFS?

The configuration page says it runs XFS.

so, would a second hand xbox fitted with a 500GByte drive beat this on price as a backup server ?

>so, would a second hand xbox fitted with a 500GByte drive beat this on price
>as a backup server.

I think you would have to plugin 2x500GB drives into your Xbox, and run a linux with software mirroring.

It might be more trouble than it's worth, but try it.

hmm, seeing as i havenae even delved into an xbox yet it may indeed be more trouble than worth.... we'll see

I just exchanged the long flimsy cable that the NAS came with, and now I'm up to 13MB per second... Hmmm, I wonder what other gigabit cables I have lying around, and what effect they will have.

Anyone looking for the 'best' (for a given value of 'best') NAS should consider the QNAP TS-109. One of the fastest available.

Just wait a few months when Samsung releases the 128GB flash drive, it will be 100 times faster than any harddrive, and optimal to replace any harddrives in any machine.

Currently I have a Siipi NAS with 6TB, it costed only 1800€, but I plan to replace all harddrives in all workstations and servers with flash drives next year. Oh, and I think I should buy some Samsung stocks too, since all other electronics companies failed.

>Anyone looking for the 'best' (for a given value of 'best') NAS should
>consider the QNAP TS-109. One of the fastest available.

Well, it might be fast, but it's only one disk and so doesn't do mirroring. Also it's slightly cheaper than the Buffalo at £120.

The old QNAP TS-209 costs about the same as the buffalo and has roughly the same featureset, but comes without drives. Still much more expensive than the Buffalo.

EDIT: QNAP TS-209 is also not much faster than the Buffalo, so it's more expensive and the same speed. £ for £, the Buffalo wins.

I'm considering the newer Qnap TS-209. I need a better backup solution, and I think this might be it, I'd run it striped. 12 years of PC usage has seen me accumulate about 100GB of data, and it's growing ever more rapidly, now that I keep MP3s at much higher quality, and render video at higher resolutions, so I'm thinking twin 750GB drives in the Qnap, mirrored.

Aside from burglary/fire, can anyone see any downsides to keeping all my irreplaceable data on it?

Just plugged in a new short cat 6 cable between NAS and router... The speed increased again, up to 15MB per second.