Central hard drive for networked computer at home -- suggestion/comments

[footprintsinconc]

does anyone here have a central hard drive that you have on your network at home that you can pull files from within your home or over the internet?

i have two real old computers, and have a wireless network. i was thinking of getting a harddrive that i could plug into my router and move all the important stuff on it. this way, everything would be in one place and i can be on one comptuer or the other to get, even through the internet, if i am not at home.

secondly, it would free up the computer hard drive. my laptop has like 30gig and its full and my desk top has more, but its old as well. if either one crashes, i wont have to worry about getting the information off of the computers.

any suggestions / dos and donts about this idea .....?

thanks,

[BobSch]

An easy way to add storage would be an external drive. Here's a bunch of choices: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCateg...al-Hard-Drives

A couple of caveats: Since most of these are USB devices, it would have to be connected to one of thePC and would only be available for sharing when that PC was on.

There are also drives that can be connected directly to your networ, but the price goes up:
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCateg...rk-Storage-NAS

[jackellis]

There are appliances that do what you're proposing. If there's a Fry's electronics in Phoenix, that's a good place to look. I've looked at them but don't remember the names. You want something that's plug and play.

You could also do the following. Add a hard drive to each machine. 160 GB of storage costs under $60 these days and soon you won't be able to find drives that small. There's a piece of freeware called Ice Mirror that will look at the differences between what's on your primary drive and what's on your backup drive, and only copy the new or changed stuff. Set it up as a scheduled task that runs in the dead of the night. You could put the backup drive for one machine in the other so if one machine is physically damaged, you still have a copy of its data. Of course, if the machine dies, you can get the data but you will have to reinstall all of the applications, and you probably know that already.

[LinuxRandal]

Over the last few years, I have used older machines running Linux and Samba, to do what your talking about. Although my network is hardwired, but I am currently looking at moving some stuff, and making it wireless.

Since my old pc's have bios and hard drive limitations, I have been looking at both the Via processor and motherboard, and the gPC's available at Walmart, as a low power substitute, that I could both add/change drives (internally, or USB).

No matter what you do, never forget you still have the need to backup. I kept an old pc, with a burner, that I could suck stuff across the network and burn it to disc.

[gsmittle]

I have a networked hard drive on my home wireless network. It's a 500GB from LaCie. LaCie sells sizes up to a couple of terabytes. All have an Ethernet port and at least a USB port as well. Administering, passwording, creating shares, etc. is done through a browser interface. Pretty simple.

I don't remember what I paid for my 500, but I remember not being too shocked by the price.

I really like being able to reach my files from any of the computers in the house. All the computers back up to this drive every night, and to DVD once a week. Plus, I have it set up so that my children each have their own storage space, which doesn't eat into the storage set aside for my wife and me.

The only downside for me is that I can't sit on the couch and edit video--the vid software doesn't like waiting on the net drive, so I have to sit at the desk and attach an external HD. I can watch video over the network fine, just not edit.

My drive is attached to a 4-port switch which is plugged into my Airport Extreme base station. The Airport is then plugged into the DSL router.

g.

[parnelli]

check out the dlink dns 323
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509

comes bare, accepts one or two sata drives. Runs linux, comes with media server and bittorrent applications, able to do RAID 0 and 1 as well


Available for 150 from the link in bobsch's post

[dlminehart]

I believe these are termed "network attached storage". You do lose a lot of speed, since Ethernet is nowhere near as fast as your local drive connection. But if you're doing only a few files a day, and they're not big, you'd never notice.

[justaguy]

+1 on the DNS-323. I have ours setup with a pair of Seagate 750GB Sata drives. We run scheduled backups of a dekstop and two laptops besides maintaining some shared storage for pictures and MP3's.

My only complaint is with the two Seagates the temperature inside the unit was 118F after the first long backup session (2hr) when the room temperature was 80F. From then on backups were for new/changed files only and much shorter in duration. I may look into replacing the cooling fan with one that moves more air. Others considering the unit might want to go with one big drive or place it in a nice cool room.

[rjwaldren]

Linksys has a few models similar to the Dlink. Will will have a few USB ports others just internal drives. Several wireless routers also have usb ports and can use third party firmware such as DD-WRT to setup Samba/FTP/VPN etc. If your looking for a more robust pre-built option look into the Buffalo devices. Otherwise look into FreeNAS or one of the Linux variants.

If you need speed most support Gig as do most new home routers. But don't expect blazing performance with any wireless connection.

[Kristofor]

I believe these are termed "network attached storage". You do lose a lot of speed, since Ethernet is nowhere near as fast as your local drive connection. But if you're doing only a few files a day, and they're not big, you'd never notice.

It's true that 1GBit ethernet connection is slower than a direct HDD connection, but it's still much faster than the sustained transfer rate of the drive itself so large files or sustained transfers aren't too bad.

The killer is the extra latency added on top of the drive's latency. For a series of many small reads and writes (like running some types of applications) this can add orders of magnitude to run times. The inefficient SMB protocol also doesn't help.

[jonmulzer]

He is talking about wireless connection to the hard drive so it is much slower than the sustained transfer rate of any modern hard drive. And regular 100Mb ethernet is also slower, but not by as much. Gb ethernet will not even max out most hard drives. Remember, those are raw data speeds, not accounting for overhead. Windows machines have a notoriously inefficeint TCP/IP stack. Also, since he is talking about older machines it is highly unlikely they are set up for Gig ethernet.

With all that said, I have always had good luck with using ClarkConnect on a spare box for NAS. It works well and is extremely functional. I have never used any of the small appliance NAS so I cannot comment with any credibility.

[footprintsinconc]

sorry, i have not been around for the last few days, so couldnt check in.

i didnt think that i would have needed to back up that hard drive. i was thinking about putting pictures, media file and document on there. however, now reading the comments, i think, i need to figure out a way to back up the central hard drive.

the setup i wanted is similar to the one pointed out in the link that parnelli posted. i wont be gaming or anything like that off of that hard drive,l but maybe some video and stuff like that. speed would be a factor, i guess that would mean that i need to get a better wireless router than the 54mbps router that i currently have.

just yesterday, i noticed costco had a few of these type of hard drives as well.

well, its time to read more into it so that i can better understand what all is reuqired...

thanks, once again for the help!

[os1kne]

I'm glad you started this thread. I was just thinking about doing something similar with my home network. I don't really care about accessing files when I'm away, but I'm curious to hear about the different options available.

[Wood_workur]

if you are going to be storing all important files centrally on it I would highly recommend a RAID setup, its RAID 1 you want- where two hard drives work together as one- each is a mirror of the other. If one dies then the data can be recovered.