On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Randy Clarksean <rclarksean at arvig.net>wrote: > I am looking for suggestions on a “cheap” storage system. I would like > it to be > > Yes … I know I want everything and do not want to pay anything. This is > for a home office type environment, not a production or high availability > server environment. > Not really. This is pretty much a solved problem in today's world. Linux can do RAID in software, so for the price of a cheap tower with enough space to hold the number of drives you plan on sticking in an array, you're good to go. You can get a hardware controller too for a little extra speed and perhaps less risk of corruption when things go bad (like a power failure).... (you were going to get a cheap UPS to get you through power hiccups, right?) If you want a large bucket of bits with some protection from crashes, I'd go RAID 5. Whether you use enterprise class disks or not, buy an extra one and just set it in the case or a safe place to serve as a hot spare. Chances are a drive will die, and you can replace the dead drive and rebuild the array while RMA'ing the dead drive. For a simpler, black-box solution, drrobo - which was linked by another on the list - looks like pure win. I hear what you're saying about not backing up to CDs/DVDs. I gave up on that a long time ago. Actually, I've grown weary of the process of dragging digital baggage of the past from system to system, generation to generation. It's time consuming and I've only got one life to live. Cataloging mp3's, cds, dvds, software, files, mail.... I think there's something to be said for the fact our brains are lossy storage mediums - it sure saves a lot of time. (climbs off soapbox). -Rob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100109/4af4ffd4/attachment-0001.htm