1TB of storage?

January 17, 2006 9:50 AM

Do you know of a cost-effective way to add 1TB of storage?

I'd like to offer remote storage to a small group of people. A 250MB drive costs around $100, so a raw TB is around $400. But I need a place to physically put them, power them and connect them.

My host operating system is FreeBSD on an old-ish Dell (Celeron), and there's no physical place in the box to attach new drives. I don't need any redundancy as this is for backup data anyway, and it'll all be accessed over a comparatively slow internet link, so USB2 is fine.

I was thinking of externally attaching (using USB2 as performance is not a concern) a chassis, but they are expensive ($250-$500) and there are 2 all-in-one solutions: IOmega XL Series and the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo which cost around $800, which seems to be worth the extra $50 for the saved time.

So my questions:

• Is there a better/cheaper/more elegant solution?
  
• Has anyone used the IOmega or Maxtor products? Good/bad/indifferent? Are they noisy?
  

posted by quiet to computers & internet (18 comments total)

Get 4 250GB driver ($100 each) with external cases ($10 each) and plug them into a network storage server ($80)
posted by blue_beetle at 9:56 AM on January 17, 2006

Also, to tag onto this post. Best place to get 250GB drives???
posted by Napierzaza at 9:56 AM on January 17, 2006

Oh, what's the maximum number of items on an IDE chain?
posted by Napierzaza at 9:57 AM on January 17, 2006

See this.
It's not the cheapest solution, but it combines the storage needs, hot-swappability, RAID, and an internal SATA II card (so it'll be faster than USB 2.0), and for $970, it includes the 1 TB's worth of drives. That might be further out of the price range than you want, but it's certainly more elegant.

Unfortunately, it's not shipping for a bit. So I'm not really helping here. But, since you mention that SATA isn't a requirement, you should consider some of LaCie's other offerings. They're generally cost-effective, include the drives, and work in a number of interfaces, although I'm not sure how many off hand will hit 1TB.
posted by disillusioned at 9:58 AM on January 17, 2006

You can only have 2 devices per IDE bus. It's not a "chain", just the standard master/slave setup.
posted by cmonkey at 9:59 AM on January 17, 2006

please for the lof of God and all things holy, just do not software RAID (especially not a stripe) the things.
posted by wakko at 10:22 AM on January 17, 2006

Napierzaza, when I shop for storage I usually check deal sites like GotApex for rebates and deals. I also check the rebate deals at office super stores (officemax, office depot and staples), often times you can get storage for considerably less than you otherwise could at a mailorder place like NewEgg, provided you submit the rebate in time (and don't get screwed).

To the original question: If cost is the main consideration, I'd probably buy drives and put them into individual storage enclosures. I don't know how FreeBSD does with USB storage though. Firewire might be better supported. A firewire card and firewire capable enclosures probably wouldn't add more than $100 to the cost over USB2-only enclosures.

Another option is to get a PC case, Find instructions on shorting the control signal on the power supply, and find some IDE to Firewire or USB controllers so you can mount all the drives in a single box.
posted by Good Brain at 10:31 AM on January 17, 2006

wakko, it didn't sound like OP was looking to use any sort of RAID, but I really don't understand why people are so against software RAID1 or 5 (no argument on the fact that raid 0 is generally to be avoided). It has its shortcomings, but the performance can be acceptable for some applications and it has the advantage of not depending on finding a particular type of controller card if there is a controller failure.
posted by Good Brain at 10:36 AM on January 17, 2006

Now i know this link has the word raid in it but ignore that and look at the materials and enclosure instead. I picked this up from "another"cough-slshdt site yesterday where this question was asked .
Big box o' disks

Pay aparticular attention to the number of fans required. This could be noisy.
posted by stuartmm at 10:48 AM on January 17, 2006

stuartmm's link is great if you want to make a big project for yourself that you can brag about at the next slashdot meetup, but really, there are much simpler solutions given the OPs's stated needs and interests.
posted by Good Brain at 10:56 AM on January 17, 2006

A few examples of ~4 drive external enclosures with firewire adapters included for less than $200: http://fwdepot.com/thestore/default.php/cPath/1_87 . You could go cheaper with individual enclosures for each drive, but having a single ventilated might be more convenient.
posted by Good Brain at 11:05 AM on January 17, 2006

Well, when dealing with RAID, you really do get what you pay for. Consider this: Is it really worth risking your data just to save a few bucks?

If you really *do* want to cheap out on things, at least ensure that you have a proper backup system in place.

/me has seen many people get burned really bad by the "RAID on the cheap" solutions.
posted by drstein at 11:10 AM on January 17, 2006

stuartmm's link is taking me here: http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/diseases/facts/ttp.htm

What gives?
posted by mds35 at 11:41 AM on January 17, 2006

Oh. Ne'ermind.
posted by mds35 at 11:41 AM on January 17, 2006

Make sure you go with a RAID 5. The data is important, right?
posted by filmgeek at 11:42 AM on January 17, 2006

RAID 5 is not a good idea for many reasons. RAID 1 and an offsite backup is often a much better idea IMO, and faster. If you're absolutely reliant on a single machine, and can replace a hard drive within a few hours of it failing, RAID 5 might be ok. Higher numbers != better though.
posted by devilsbrigade at 12:33 PM on January 17, 2006

It seems that blue_beetle missed that the linked external enclosure for $10 is for a 2.5" drive, which would be the size of a laptop drive. If you do go down that path, you'll need a 3.5" enclosure, as, as far as I'm aware, there aren't any 2.5" drives that store anywhere near 250gb.

As for locating cheap, high capacity drives, check digg deals for up to the minute bargains, or pricewatch.com has served me well in the past.
posted by jcruden at 12:46 PM on January 17, 2006

We've been very pleased in my shop with a Buffalo 1TB Terastation (read about it here ). It can be had for less than $900, and configured either as RAID 0, 1, or 5. Gigabit ethernet, embedded Linux OS, very quiet, and in 6 months of constant use utterly reliable and never needed a reboot. Ours backs up a Mac server via Retrospect. Tiny footprint. This followed several more expensive NAS servers that proved to be dogs. I'm about to buy another one because it has made me very happy. One caveat: it plays well with Macs, but you need a PC to set it up. And it's a pain in the ass to open it up and swap drives. But we haven't needed to.
posted by spitbull at 2:33 PM on January 17, 2006