Best way to store one terabyte?
26 Aug 2006
I’ve gotten quite some response on my Netgear SC101 post (in short: they don’t always work). There’s some catharsis in bashing inferior products, but at the end of the day, how DOES on store lots of data securely? Let’s make this more specific: how would you store 1 terabyte (1000 GB) of data on your desktop?
Let take these as requirements:
- raw storage: 1TB or more (if used with RAID-0 striping or JBOD config)
- redundant storage: RAID-1: leaves 500GB, RAID-5: leaves 660GB to 800GB
- affordable: anything higher that €2000 (2$/GB) is not an option
- accessible via either Firewire/USB or Ethernet (Gigabit)
- accessible by Mac, PC and Linux
- preferably not rack-mounted (who has a 19″ rack at home)
- hot-swappable disks are a big advantage
What have you tried and what are you happy with?
Some possible theoretical options:
- Direct attached drive
- e.g. Lacie Biggest F800 1GB, 4-disk S-ATA: €1299
- meets requirements? YES. Only Firewire + USB
- Network attached storage
- e.g. Maxtor Shared Storage II 1GB, 2-disk: €899
- meets requirements? YES. Only Ethernet
- Lacie Ethernet disk would not work: it’s rackmounted and has no RAID
- Build your own server
- e.g. Dell PowerEdge SC430 with 2 x SATA 500GB drives and Linux: around €1000
- meets requirements? YES. Only Ethernet
For me, the only solution I have experienced to be 100% reliable is building a dedicated PC with a hardware RAID card. What is your experience?