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| Dave Rathbun |
 Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2006 4:46 am Post subject: |
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CFO
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| acdawg712 wrote: | | External hard drives have much more memory capability |
Yes, I'll give you that. I carry at 120GB external drive.
| Quote: | | and also are just as easy to carry. |
I'll argue with you on this one.  My external drive requires its own power cord, its own power brick, a high-speed USB adapter card (the inboard USB ports on my laptop are not 2.0), and a cable. My flash drive is, well, about the size of a thumb and requires no additional cables of any kind. 
There are some external USB drives that can draw power from the USB port, or from a PS/2 port instead. But they all require cables of some sort.
Now where's that 120GB flash drive...  |
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| Dave Rathbun |
| Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 6:44 am Post subject: |
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CFO
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Since we're sharing hardware tips I'll share one of my own. I have a number of these devices, and I love them.
It's as bit weird, but their corporate home page currently resolves to an IP address, but here it is: Snap Appliance What it is?
It's a small case with two (or more) hard drives in it and an ethernet port. You "snap" it into your network, and you instantly have network-attached storage, or NAS, on a low budget scale. You can set the device up as two drives (JBOD), a single large drive (RAID 0), or as RAID 1 (mirror). A few years ago I had a hard-drive crash on the "family" computer, this is the one where we kept all of our financial records, among other things. Of course the most recent backup was months prior.  So now I have two of these:
Snap Server 2200
Each of them has 500GB of raw capacity. I am using the Mirror configuration, which gives me 250 GB of redundant capacity. I have two of these, plus an older model that I have upgraded to 120GB (again mirrored).
They are truly a plug-and-play device. For what it's worth, you can buy the cheapest model and upgrade the hard-drives yourself, if you don't mind losing your warranty. The box has a sticker on it that voids your warranty if it is removed, and you have to remove it to update the box. What I did was buy a cheaper model and then wait for the warranty to expire, then I upgraded the disks.
You can mount the drive using a wide variety of networks, including NFS, Apple, Novell, even Linux. They also make rack-mount versions which take up less space (how many other people do you know with a rack in their home office  ) but costs more.
You manage the unit via a browser interface. You can even set it up as a basic home web server, although to be honest it sucks at that. You can have it set up to email someone if one of the disks fails. In a mirrored environment a disk failure should not result in lost data, as everything written to one disk is written to the other at the same time. I have tested this, and it works.
Cool toys. Cool stuff. |
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