Affordable RAID5 NAS
What a difference a year makes in the storage market… 1TB drives cost under $150 each and Network Attached Storage devices are almost consumer grade.
For about $300 you can purchase a Promise Technology SmartStore NS4300N; put up to four SATA-II hard drives in it and have yourself a fault tolerate storage device that your Windows, Mac, and *nix computers can access via their native file sharing protocols, and manage it via your browser.
The device is derived from an Intel reference design, obviously using Intel technology. It’s got relatively good performance, very easy to use, and provides anyone with any computer ability a simple fault tolerate storage device of up to 1.5TB (assuming you buy four 1TB drives, and configure it for RAID5).
The technology of this device is very similar to the 16-channel SATA-II RAID5/6 controllers I use in my servers, and the device is somewhat like the Infrant ReadyNAS 600s that I was quite fond of (Infrant was acquired by NetGear, and since then they have been slow to innovate, and maintained what I would say is an outdated pricing model).
There’s a host of reasons beyond just having a fault tolerant storage device that makes something like this a potential buy. You don’t need to keep computer’s your using on to access data (that can be important if you have multiple computers), you don’t need to worry about backing up your data if you need to re-install your operating system, you don’t need to worry about how to share data between Windows and Mac.
The only downside I’ve found to the Promise verses the Infrant devices is that Promise botched the implementation of spin-down; so the devices keep the drives spinning all the time. Yeah, it would say a little power to spin down the drives when they weren’t being access (at the cost of taking longer to access data once they’ve spun down), but with today’s drives we’re not talking about that much power — and you have options when purchasing drives of ones that have “green” / high-efficiency ratings.
For both small business, and personal use for those who depend on storage I highly recommend you consider a device like this.
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