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Best External Storage Solution for SOHO Setups?
terradyn asks: "Recently, I've been looking for a cheap external storage subsystem solution. Aside from the fibre channel high end solutions out there (IBM FastT, HP EVA, etc.), I haven't been able to find much for the SOHO type market. My current best possibility is this. It provides the capacity and interface type I was looking for (8 bay, ATA6, 1394) but lacks features like RAID5 or NAS type abilities. Has anyone found a better solution with at least RAID5 in a similar or smaller form factor for use in the home (I need the space/speed/reliability for video work)?"
I've recently been looking at the Transtec IDE/SCSI rackmount disk packs. They do tower versions as well, which take up to 16 large IDE disks, with raid 0/1/5 and provide dual host SCSI out. Ideal for getting large amounts of redundant storage at a reasonable price if seek performance isn't critical.
If anyone has used these particular models, I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences...
Have you taken a look at 3ware ? ;-). (NO I do NOT work for them, nor do I resell them, just another happy customer).
They make RAID controllers with RAID5 support, all based on ATA-IDE drives, the biggest controller supporting up to 12 drives.
They also support hotswap and all the other goodies you'd expect of a SCSI-RAID-system, but at the price of IDE
There's hardware support for win/linux/freebsd (Not sure about Mac, but I've tried it under the 3 mentioned and it worked like a charm).
With the recent adoption of the iSCSI standard, I'd expect to see a lot more inexpensive network storage solutions from commercial providers RSN.
If you have to have it now, then you have to have it now. But if you can wait a bit, you'll probably get a lot more for your money in a few months.
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