Nas or Second PC?

alexx · 13 Mar 2010 at 09:35

I want to get all the harddrives out my main system bar the system drive which will be a ssd and 150gb velocoraptor

ive probably got about 6tb of drives that i need access to occasionally but would also like the idea of a raid 1 secure space for a tb of it

ive looked into nas caddies a bit but they seem like a fair amount of cash when i could probably just build a second system for £120ish to do the same job / probably better?

is that a bit naive or does that sound right?

Adrianr · 13 Mar 2010 at 10:03

Do you not need to backup the stuff you only have occaisional access too? Why not just throw the lot in one big RAID5 array and cover everything? You loose a bit of overall space but it's more flexible if you want to get bigger drives to increase space later on.

I'de just stump up for an automated NAS solution, but I'm lazy

rpstewart · 13 Mar 2010 at 10:03

I've never been impressed with NAS caddies, unless you spend serious money the performance tends to be pretty poor.

If I was you I'd be looking at a second PC and possibly running Windows Home Server on it, that'll give you expandability and the option to mirror certain pieces of data almost on the fly.

bees · 13 Mar 2010 at 13:53

NAS transfer rate is so poor, I used to using pc as my movie server but later on because of considering electricity bill I swap it with NAS. to be honest, my transfer rate from 60-80mb/s drop to 6-10mb/s.

alexx · 14 Mar 2010 at 10:19

ouchhhh, was your lekky bill really that bad to warrent changing? think i might try to do a dirt cheap underclocked build, have to see whats lurking in the celler at work

thanks for the ideas ill try windows home server