Hi Guys, I'm in the market for an external drive to replace my LaCie cased 160Gb drive. What I would like to do is get a unit that has multiple drives in it, so I can run it in RAID1 to mirror everything - the idea being that it gives me a degree of resilience should a drive fail, without the need for endless tape backups (which is what I have to do at the mo) It needs to be OSX compatible, be able to be formatted in Apples HFS+ USB2 or Firewire, no preference. NAS would be nice, but it's not really neccessary I've seen some units around, but thought I'd ask here just in case you guys come up with some options I haven't seen. BTW - I'll be getting rid of a 40Gb Travan tape backup unit in a LaCie case, along with the existing external drive once I get sorted out... Anybody interested? Cheers, GOO
I've been looking into the same thing a while and the best solution I've come across is the D-Link 323. Supports two drives, has RAID etc and doesn't cost the earth.
The prices for that are for a bare enclosure, right? You'd have to factor in the cost of a couple of hefty drives as well. 500Gb drives seem to be about £60, so it's another £120... What about one of these? Anybody got one? http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=529000 It's not NAS, but like I said, it's a nice to have but not essential.
Yes your correct GOO in that you would need drives, when I was looking into it I was after a NAS with RAID more than just a external box (which is your needs).
I looked into NAS Raid boxes a while ago and found that there are a couple of major pitfalls. Firstly, many of them use their own proprietary file format. If anything should happen to the box itself, don't think that you'll be able to pop one of the drives into a convenient PC, or even a USB caddy. You'll have to buy another box from the same manufacturer (assuming the firmware's not changed...). Secondly, none of the ones that I looked at were capable of doing a self-repair. If you have a motherboard that supports Raid (or a Raid card), then it's normally the case that if one drive fails, when you replace it with a new one, the Raid controller will automatically rebuild the array onto the new drive. If your Raid drive won't do this, then you'll have to back up the remaining drive to something else, replace the faulty disk, reformat both drives and then reload the data. It's worth trying to get hold of the manual for the drive in PDF format from the manufacturer as these facts aren't normally made clear by the retailers. A Raid 1 drive may guard you against a drive failure - but it's not a substitute for regular backups.
GOO thought about this unit? It's similar to the one you linked to but with ethernet. http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=567860
I ordered one of these yesterday from Scan, and it arrived this morning. A very sexy looking bit of kit! I'll post my thoughts on it later once I've got it up and running. Damn you work!
If you keep an eye on the forums over at www.hotukdeals.com they usually find some great bargains. I picked up a 320gb WD MyBook for under £40, and that was about 6 months ago!
Ok, here's my initial thoughts on trying to set this up... First off, the supplied software in PC only. Not much help if you have a Mac. But you don't need the software supplied anyway, as all functions and settings can be set via the drives' admin page. To set it up, just bung it onto a free port on your router, and make sure you have dhcp turned on. The drive will pick up the next available ip address, and then you can bung this in your browser and access the settings web page. It is supplied out of the box as one contiguous drive (1Tb). To use Raid 1 (mirroring) you need to tell the drive via the admin pages that's what you want. It'll then take several hours to create the mirroring, and you're left with a nice 500gb drive that you know won't take everything with it when a drive (inevitably) fails. You need to create shares via the admin panel - these show up as network drives in XP or OSX It looks great - Nice and compact, gloss white (so a nice companion to the previous round of Apple hardware before it went all black and brushed alu...). It has a blue power light (the outer ring on the front of the unit) and a 'fuel guage' style capacity meter (innner ring) giving a rough estimation of space left. It's bloody noisy - the fan sounds like a jet engine! There is however a fix for this which entails turning the fan from suck to blow (or vice versa). I'm going to do this fix and see what happens - if not I'll just bung in a quiteter fan. The drive apparently runs an embedded version of Linux. There seems to be some cool geeky stuff at http://martin.hinner.info/mybook/, which allows you to turn on SSH etc. There also seems to be a media server you can install on it: http://wiki.fireflymediaserver.org/MyBook_World_Edition_Install
Any chance you could test the self repair function by removing a drive whilst in RAID1? I'm curious to see if it can self-repair or if as I suspect it's not just as simple as putting a equal sized drive in.
I believe the rebuild is not automatic. According to the manual, you swap the failed drive, turn it back on and then tell it to rebuild via the web interface Rebuilding a RAID1 drive - Ignore the WD software and just use the web interface. MyBook User Guide
Just an update on the fan noise situation - I did the 'fix' to the drive that's knocking around the net (you flip the fan round). It seems to be quieter... But I've ordered a replacement fan (it's a 50x50x10mm case fan) which is aledgedly 22db at full wack. Since doing the 'fix', I haven't heard the exisiting fan go full speed (30db, I'm led to believe by the manufacturers website), so the case is probably running it at 7v or something... Hopefully the new fan will be even quieter than the stated 22db at that voltage. The other thing I've noticed is that the drives themselves never spin down. They're always on. They're not that noisy (you can't really hear them over the fan). Martin Hinner (the guy with the WD hacking website) is developing a spin down app that will run on the box, so I'll keep my eyes peeled for that when he's got it done. Apart from all that, it works flawlessly.
GOO - just wanted to say - I'm looking for exactly the same thing and this post helped a whole lot! cheers bud
