How to solve my storage problem

[Net Surfer]

My laptop has only 500GB disk space. But I have about 5 TB data and
growing. I want to buy something that can hold that much data. And I
can easily access the data from my laptop.

Most cost-effective drive is 2TB - 3TB USB or ESATA external drive.
So I need about 2 to 3 such drives and swap among them as I go along.
Is there a solution I can access them all the them and less swapping
involved?

 

[Arno]

My laptop has only 500GB disk space. But I have about 5 TB data and
growing. I want to buy something that can hold that much data. And I
can easily access the data from my laptop.

Most cost-effective drive is 2TB - 3TB USB or ESATA external drive.
So I need about 2 to 3 such drives and swap among them as I go along.
Is there a solution I can access them all the them and less swapping
involved?

No swapping -> USB Hub.

But you need at least 4 disks them, unless your data has no
worth and you do not need a backup.

Arno

 

[mscotgrove]

No swapping -> USB Hub.

But you need at least 4 disks them, unless your data has no
worth and you do not need a backup.

Arno

What is your data. If it is text/data records, them compression may
help.

Also, part the reasoning is how often do you want to acess that data.
If it is an archive that you occasionally want to see small files
from, then zipping the files may be fine. If it is a working
database, then the only compression viable would be something like
NTFS compression. If speed is critical, then compression may not be
ideal.

If it is music / video / photos then compression wll do nothing.

To access >2TB ( ie size of current large disk) without swapping you
may consider a RAID, eg JBOD, RAID5. I would avoid RAID-0 as a single
disk failure loses all data. On JBOD a single disk failure only
potentially loses 50% or 33%. RAID-5 can be slow without a
speciallised controller board. You could also consider NAS, but
dpends on the speed of your network port on laptop, and volume of data
you will be transfering on a daily basis.

Vista and Windows 7 both support NTFS disks (or logical disks) greater
than 2TB. XP I am not sure, but would require special drivers.

As Arno says, do not forget about backup, and I will add that one
backup should be offsite

Michael
www.cnwrecovery.com