File Server Required for £500

[PiKe]

Our office requires a File Server with redundancy for about £500 or a little more.

We could do with a RAID array that has hotswap functionality but if it pushes it too far over budget then we can do without.

Tape would be the best option to back up whats on the server but it's simply too expensive and we would need an autoloader because we will eventually have several hundred gigabytes of information.

Any suggestions.

 

[PiKe]

Is it a mission critical?

We're a photo library, each image is digitised and entered into a database, it would take say 1hour per image.

The budget is flexible but I need some idea's, I need to present something to my boss which he agree's with. He does like the idea of RAID 5 parity...

 

[PiKe]

See what we currently use is 3 Onetouch II drives, one died this morning which raised this question of a better backup.

Even though the drive failed to be recognised anymore by the machine, we clone the disk onto an identical drive at 16:45 each day so we suffored no loss at all. But then it became questionable how long the others would last, it may of been an isolated issue but it does cast doubt in your mind.

With hard drives I would expect the mechanicals to wear out long before anything else but aparently the interface on this particular drive died.

Now I realise that tape is the ultimate backup but how much are we talking for a tape backup and 300gig of tape?