Additional storage - advice needed

lokkers

lokkers

lokkers

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Joined
1 Mar 2004
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1,929
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Farnborough, Hants
Hi guys and girls,

I'm after some external storage for my network at home for 2 reasons:

1) to backup my fileserver
2) to transport around when I travel back to my parents (as I only have limited storage on my laptop).

I've been looking at the Icy Box caddies, with an idea to add a 160gb drive and attach it via USB to the fileserver. The drawback is that its an old machine that only supports USB 1.1, so if I share the disk it will be painfully slow across the network :( It would however mean I can take it with my when I travel home, and the laptop obviously supports both USB 2.0 and 1394 (Firewire).

Would it therefore be worth going for a cheap NAS enclosure (like THIS ), which I can pop on either the network here or direct into the laptop if necessary?

I'm only looking to spend a max of £100 including disk (which only needs to be 160gb).

Thanks :)
 
Buy a USB 2.0 PCI plate (£5) - this will run across the PCI bus which should have 30MB/s to spare out of the 133MB/s it should have (assuming it is from 2002 onwards approx). What chipset is it?
 
its a Supermicro Intel 440BX/440GX, so not sure when the manufacture date is, although i suspect pre-2000.

The Lacie looks good, but its only got a 2 year warranty - if i put my own drive in a caddy it gives me a 5 year warranty on the disk, and as I'm mainly using wireless, gigabit lan is overkill at the moment...
 
Hmm, it is likely you have 66MB/s bus bandwidth minimum, up to the full 133Mb/s. Let's assume you have only 66MB/s, I would still say that a USB2.0 card would work fine as it would probably use most of that bandwidth but I can't see anything else rinsing into it except maybe a sound card, TV card etc if you have one installed. If not, then get a USB2.0 pci card.
 
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