Removable hard drives, USB disks, or NAS for backups?

[consolibyte]

Right now we have a trio of USB hard drives that we use for backups- each week one gets brought home with someone so we always have an off-site backup.

They're almost filled up, so we're looking for something new. We could just get three bigger USB hard drives... but the USB drives seem really slow to transfer data, so we're looking around to see if there's something better. The backups are basically 230gb of small text files.

Would a better solution be to go with a NAS drive? Or maybe removeable SATA drives?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

While these are nice, the fans are a little loud; from own personal experience.

 

[Paperlantern]

Those ARE nice, mine is distributed by Startech, but its the exact same thing. I dont find the fan is all that loud. I use mine for a RAID 5 Array, though if you were running backups to take home I would imagine you wouldnt RAID anything you would just yank them out when backup is done and take it home. It would solve the speed issue as SATA is a lot faster than USB, or even firewire. My home server is where I have the RAID 5 array in that enclosure, and i back it up with a 1TB MyBook with firewire. My full backups are only about 145GB so far and takes maybe a little over an hour, so yours would be prolly an hour and a half or so maybe? This is older firewire hardware too, it might not even be 800MBps.

 

[dac7nco]

I use one of these in a 5.25" bay about once per month, and store the drives elsewhere. They're cheap.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817986001

Daimon

 

[Paperlantern]

I actually wouldnt mind one of those myself dac, thats pretty slick.

 

[mfenn]

I'd say that a NAS is better for reliability and automation purposes, but that you'd lose the off-site ability (unless someone wants to lug it around!). 230GB is pretty small potatoes, so you might want to look at a cloud-based backup solution like Carbonite.