Additional storage - advice needed

lokkers

lokkers

lokkers

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1 Mar 2004
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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?
 
smids said:
What chipset is it?
Click to expand...

yeah that was an alternative, although I've no idea what chipset it is. I'd be surprised if it was newer than 2002 to be honest however!
 
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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