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Home Network Data Storage Device
It happened again- a machine on my home network died. Taking with it tons of data. It's mostly backed up. No huge loss. But I finally think it's time to get some sort of network raid disk. A unified place to safely store data accessible to the numerous machines on my home lan. So now I pose to Slashdot readers- what are your recommendations? I'm looking for something with RAID and SMB sharing. At least a quarter TB, probably a half, but with some room to grow. What have you used? What works? What fails?
There are dozens of products out there to do this. Linksys alone makes several. You obviously didn't search slashdot, google, etc. The fact this article got accepted... Words fail me.
-Foxxz
Not to mention that the cheapest floppy drive I found on quick newegg and froogle searches was $5.00 (And that's not even USB, but let's go with it.) Let's just assume that with that sort of volume you can pick them up for $1.00 a unit. That's still $150,000 just for the drives, and you still have to worry about cables, floppy media, hubs and controllers (I believe one USB root hub can only control 127 root devices, uncluding hubs, so let's say about 100 floppy drives and 30 hubs per controller, means 1,500 USB controllers plus 45,000 hubs (powered of cours). This means you have to run power to every floppy drive, or at the very least to every hub, so you have quite possibly several miles of cable to deal with, and some way to generate all this electrical power (Hint: your standard home fusebox probably won't handle it. assume half an amp per device at 12 volts, that's 6 watts, that's almost a megawatt of power assuming good efficiency, so expect no less than about 1000 amps in your standard household 120v current just to power the drives.) and then dissipate the extra heat. And a place to put a square of 400X400 floppies, plus all the auxillary equipment won't be free.
So, we're easilly talking on the order of... a million dollars in equipment, labor and other expenses. Oh, and this is just talking about RAID 0. If any of those 150,000 floppies fail the whole array fails. Even with massive redundancy you will still need at least a full time employee going around swapping in floppies when one fails. Not to mention you'd need to multiply all the original costs by the amount of redundancy, plus overhead (we're talking having to hire managers and middle managers to coordinate the whole process.)
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman