Comments on: RAID in the home, part 2

Comment on RAID in the home, part 2 by: Tom

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:20:03 +0000

Chris, I’ve looked at that Linksys box also. I read somewhere that once you put the data on a USB drive behind the Linksys box, then you can’t move the USB drive to a normal computer and access your data. Do you know if that’s true? I’d hate to be tied into Linksys forever.

As far as swapping the HDDs: Yes, a hardware RAID card should be able to put the RAID together during boot regardless of which port or address the drives are located at. But I wouldn’t try it during normal operation.

Comment on RAID in the home, part 2 by: Chris

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 17:56:54 +0000

Hi,

Personally, I use the home “NAS” solution from Linksys. It is really a good product, for a very nice price. It can do batch copy of data from DISK1 to DISK2 and also could be used as an incremental backup device if needed. I bought it to provide centrlized acces to multimedia files from all computers in my home. Cerneanly, performance is poor, compared to IDE HDD but it is quite good.

Before this device I have tested a box from Netgear (SC101). Nice design but … that’s all. Hangs while transferring large files and uses a driver which should be installed on the system (Widows only). Sold the same price as the Linksys device, it does not provide network storage solution.

Conclusion: Linksys is the product to chose if you need home network storage with buit-in security and data backup facility. It’s not a real-time mirroring (RAID 1) but secure enough for home usage.

I still have one question: What does it happend if I swap the 2 HDD ? Data still readable ? Hope so …

Chris (Paris/France)

Comment on RAID in the home, part 2 by: Tom

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 17:11:52 +0000

Anonymous, it’s easiest if you have room in your computer case to mount those drive. Then you can use a cheap internal SCSI cable. If you go external you’ll have to buy a different and more expensive cable. Plus, you’d have to by an external box with integrated power. That’s probably going to cost you $100-200 more than just staying internal.

Also, if decide to go external, make sure your SCSI card has an external connector.

Comment on RAID in the home, part 2 by: Tom

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 17:09:39 +0000

Cedric, yeah, I’ve had my eye on that Linksys box for my own home use. Looks like a good product. I didn’t realize that it could automatically copy data. Very nice.

But I heard that performance was horrible, and that the USB drive could not be moved back to a normal Windows machine and be read. What do you think about that?

Comment on RAID in the home, part 2 by: Cedric

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 18:48:10 +0000

Hi,

I’ve got at home a small NAS solution from Linksys (NSLU2). I started with one USB drive connected on it then i realised that all my pictures, movies, banking informations were stored with any HW redundancy so i decided to install a second USB drive. The NSLU2 is able to copy every day the whole content of Disk1 to Disk2. It’s clearly not a RAID 1 but at least it provides a security if i loose a drive.

The solution cost was around 300$ for 300GB of disks.

Cedric