I currently have an NSLU2 with a Terrabyte attached to it at the moment. It is a little sluggish, but i can put up with it as it just stores my movies and tv series collections. Its a bit of a drag copying stuff to it, but onces it is there, it streams around the house to any of the 4 XMBC machines great.

After a very recent episode with my iMac, where i was very close to having lost 5 years worth of family photos, i’ve started taking data security seriously at home, which is weird, because i take it seriously at work.

I am definately looking at going down the RAID 5 route, but as always, there is a budget that comes in to play.

I have toyed with the idea of getting an cheap machine, or build one from old parts i have and make this into a RAID server, but when you start totalling it all up, something like the N4100+ comes in at around the same total cost, comes in a nicer looking box and uses FAR less power (which is good when it is going to be runing 24/7).

I have toyed with idea of the cheap HP Proliant Server, but for the reasons i just mentioned, i decided against it.

At work, we have a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with 3 x 500gig drives in it setup as RAID 5 giving us 1 terabytes of storage. Had it about a year now and have had no problems with it. Great little machine, but as you are probably aware, these are a little expensive. Around £500 diskless.

After reading many reviews and comments, i seem to have settled on the Thecus N4100+. The performance of this may not be entirely a lot better than my NSLU2, but i wasn’t unhappy with it in the first place. I just want something that will allow me to expand my storage capacity and keep my data secure.

With the N4100+ coming in at about £250, i would initially install 3 x 750gig. This would be an initial outlay of about £500 which would give me 1.5tb of space. Idealy i would like to stick 1 TB drives in there, but as i need at least 3 for a RAID 5 setup, this could get very expensive very quickly. I would probably look to maxing out the system to 4TB down the line.

The Thecus 5200 looks very tasty, with its better performance, and 5 drive bays for future expandability, but again you are looking at £500 without any disks.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.