Beat the problem with a sledgehammer
1:22pm Thursday, July 21st, 2005 by RolandeSo, after having a catastrophic hard drive failure over this past weekend and being stupid enough not to have a current backup, I decided to beat the problem to death with a sledgehammer. This propels me into the strotosphere of ultra-geek-dom.
I went out and bought a 1 Terabyte RAID 5 Network Attached Storage device [called a Terastation] from Buffalo Technology. Now I have about 730Gig worth of usable drive space that is network accessible. Fry’s Electronics was having a 2 day special on it with a $70 mail-in rebate. The price just couldn’t be beat anywhere online or off. So, after being bitten by Murphy with my last drive, I have vowed to never let it happen again.
Now, I can automate full backups of all my machines on my home network and not have to worry about space or drive failure. With a RAID 5 array I can lose any disk in the array and still recover by just replacing the drive. RAID 5 stripes the data across all of the drives with parity information stored on one of the alternate drives in the array. When a drive fails, all you have to do is replace the drive and it will automatically be rebuilt from the parity information stored on the remaining drives.
This device supports Windows SMB filesharing as well as an FTP server. It can also speak Appletalk if you insist. It has basic security/authentication support built in for each file share you create. The NIC card supports autosense 10/100/1000 Base-T speeds. The 4 drives on my particular unit are 250GB Western Digital Caviar drives that are EIDE, UltraATA 100 with a 2MB Buffer. Nothing particularly fancy but they will get the job done at that price range.
The unit is nice and quiet with a small footprint. It also has a default idle sleep timer on the drives for 30 minutes to conserve power. You can also schedule sleep timers for the drives if you want. It draws about 57 Watts peak and I think it is around 17 Watts when idle. So, even if it was running peak power all the time, it would still only cost me around $2-3/month on my electric bill. Not bad at all.
