Poormans NAS... please help

[scooterspal]

Having gotten burned earlier this year buying one of those $550
Western Digital 2T NAS drives... the thing is slower than a turtle...
I need to make a change to something else. I'm not made of money so
I need to get this right this time.

I've done tests just using a bare bones W2K computer on the network and
copying from one computer's HD to it's HD (Internal C drives all around)
and gotten twice the speed of the NAS drive for the same 2g media file.

I'm leaning towards getting a basic, used P3 or P4 tower-type system and
perhaps running two ATA 1T drives off the secondary IDE cable. The C and
CD drive being on the primary IDE cable.

Any reason why this should not give me the same results I'm getting
with my test system.... double the speed of the NAS drive... plus the
benefit of being able to work on those files right on the same system
they're stored on?

Thanks for any advice you can provide.

 

[Phillip Windell]

It would work. But speed isn't everything, you need fault tolerance since
often large storage is a problem to do backups so they may not get backed up
often, particularly in a "low-dollar" situation.

You need hardware that has solid RAID capable controllers,..preferably with
hot-swappable drives. Some PCs in the home-use arena have SATA RAID
controllers can do various forms of RAID but they are not hot-swappable
which causes you to have to take down the server to change a failed drive
and it is also more difficult to correctly identify which one of the
physical drives has failed. Their Controller hardware on the motherboard is
not as solid either and a failed controller may cause the complete loss of
the data on the whole array.

--
Phillip Windell
www.wandtv.com

The views expressed, are my own and not those of my employer, or Microsoft,
or anyone else associated with me, including my cats.