Cheap NAS storage?

[multiband8303]

Need to have an offsite backup done, we have plenty of hard drives lying around - would like to do find some "cradle" that I could just hookup to the network - and wammo spool off some SQL crap to it and be done with it.

 

[RebateMonger]

Unless you have HUGE SQL files, the simplest method is to put the old drives in external USB housings and using those as removable backup drives. I recommend always keeping at least one drive off-site at all times.

Backups to a USB-attached drive will almost certainly be faster than any low-end NAS box.

 

[multiband8303]

Alright mr price guru, wheres the best deal on one?

 

[JackMDS]

http://www.shoplocal.com/defau...=135250+106491+150028&

 

[multiband8303]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
http://www.shoplocal.com/defau...=135250+106491+150028&

broken link.

 

[multiband8303]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Unless you have HUGE SQL files, the simplest method is to put the old drives in external USB housings and using those as removable backup drives. I recommend always keeping at least one drive off-site at all times.

Backups to a USB-attached drive will almost certainly be faster than any low-end NAS box.

We are talking 250 gigs....

 

[RebateMonger]

You didn't say what size your "old drives laying around are". With drives so cheap ($80 for 500GB), you may just want to get new drives.

I prefer Apricorn USB and SATA housings from Newegg.com, if they still have them in stock. Those are heavy metal, with good horizontal fans for cooling. I prefer to have fans in my backup drive housings, since these drives work pretty hard when doing backups. Some backups run for 10 hours!

What we've been doing for small- to mid-size offices is put 320 or 500 GB SATA hard drives in hot-swap SATA trays. You may need a PCI or PCI-E controller card. You can backup files at around 70 MegaBytes per second. Maybe a lot faster than that if your backup software does compression.

We've been using SATA trays with LCD fan speed and temperature displays/alarms, available from http://granitedigital.com for about $40 per drive. ($60 for the first housing/tray and $30 for subsequent trays). Buy a minimum of three drives, so one is always offsite.

 

[acaeti]

You could also get an eSATA card for the host and use eSATA which should be somewhat faster than USB2/FW400 (you should be able to max out the spindle on the connected disk). eSATA behaves just like USB/FW (ie eject disk before removing) in Windows. I have used a SYBA PCI-E 1x 2-port eSATA card based on a SIL chip with success. Drivers are ok, just update firmware to most recent version from SIL's website.