Install A Terabyte Of Storage At Home

FOR AROUND $600, you can get nearly a terabyte of online home LAN storage – 800 GB to be precise - into a form factor about the size of a smaller toaster. If you're willing to spend a little more and take a little risk with heat, you can jack that up to a terabyte.

Start simple by building out on with the NetGear SC101 storage central. It can be purchased at the local Big Box for around $100 or so with the rebate of the week. It's about 6.75-inches long, about 4.25-inches wide, and 5.75-inches high.

You can slide one or two IDE 3.5-inch drives into the enclosure and it comes bundled with software that allows you to either mirror between the two drives or in a network of multiple SC101 devices.

Two drawbacks to the device are that the network interface is a 10/100 Ethernet port, not GigE, and there's no fan to cool the drives. If you're going to have a network device accessible by multiple computers moving around large amounts of data, GigE would be really nice. The fan would normally not be a big deal, but there's a reason for hesitation.

To this empty case, we add a pair of spanking new 3.5-inch IDE drives. A knee-jerk reaction is to try to find the best price on a pair of Hitachi DeskStar 7K500 500GB drives and drop them in, but Hitachi is packing five plates into a 3.5-inch size, generating a whole lot of heat, according to a review in Tom's Hardware Guide, here. Since the NetGear mini-toaster doesn't have a fan, a pair of Hitachis sounds like a recipe for cooking data. They also cost around $330-350 per drive.

Article - The Inquirer