Home terabyte storage, Part deux

INQ READERS were quick to flood my mailbox with comments and recommendations on how to put a terabyte of disk storage on-line as I discussed last week here. The benchmark I set was for close to one terabyte of storage in about the form factor the size of a toaster, using relatively simple off-the-shelf gear. To be precise, I proposed spending around $600 list for a pair of Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB drives and putting them into a NetGear SC101 storage central enclosure.

Most people who chimed in complained that the NetGear box didn't support anything other than Windows - I don't find this to be a tragic big deal since if you're running Linux, you can find yourself a way to rig up a RAID array with a suitable distro on a spare server. And the Mac "5 percenters" will no doubt get themselves a terabyte solution from His Holiness Steven Jobs sometime in the next eighteen months because many people buying copies of "Lost" and other television shows will ultimately want a box stamped with an Apple logo to archive their video. The price of disks will have come down sufficiently so Apple can get a good markup on a home terabyte server and it'll have a flavor of RAID because Steve will want to put commercial-class data storage into a home product because it'll be "cool."

A number of people had much love for the Buffalo Technology's TeraStation capable of holding anywhere from 600 GB to 1.6 TB. I wrote about the device back in February here (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21248), but it's still street pricing between $925-975 at 1 TB of storage. If you have the change to write a check that big, you get a lot of functionality. While the baseline configuration runs under Windows, the Terastation will support Apple and Linux clients as well. It also has a Gigabit Ethernet port and four (4) USB 2.0 ports, plus support to shut down automatically from a UPS trip signal. Plus it has a fan to cool everything down, so if you put 500 GB Hitachis in it, you can manage the heat they throw off.

If you are, like myself, a little bit reluctant to blow as much money in one pop on a TB of local area storage as you have for a computer recently, there's a lower-end alternative worth taking a closer look at. The D-Link MediaLounge DSM-G600 Wireless G Network Storage Enclosure (what a mouthful) has appeared on local BigBox shelves for around $300. It's a bit pricier than the NetGear SC101 toaster and can only hold a single 3.5 inch drive, but there's a lot more beef in the networking electronics as well. It comes with wireless-G and a Gigabit Ethernet port built in, so you can either plug it into a GigE hub in a wired/short-haul setup or set it up farther away with an 802.11g network. Less throughput, but also less cabling. The DSM-G600 also has a pair of USB 2.0 ports for adding USB-based storage and can also be used to setup up an 802.11g access point in a pinch.

A combination of DSM-G600 and a 400 GB Barracuda 7200.8 will run you around $500 to $550, depending on how you shop around. It's obviously a more expensive solution per GB/TB than what was proposed last week, but there's also a lot more flexibility in network configuration and better performance if you are running GigE. µ