I’m about to return a network hard drive (the
loan period finished and it is too expensive for
me) and I need to replace it with another. If
anyone here has personal experience of one to
consider or to avoid, I’d be interested to hear
it!
The basics are:
Decent capacity (500GB to 1TB),
Not too noisy,
Moderate to good speed over Ethernet,
SMB file sharing,
And low cost would be nice of course!
This isn’t destined to be a Time Machine backup
source, so that aspect is only of academic
interest; it is mainly for the music collection,
which is played using a couple of Sonos systems.
PC World has the 1TB Western Digital My Book
network hard drive for £150. I’m not going to use
the Anywhere Access, just standard local network
connections. This is a possible contender…
The Buffalo TeraStation and Infrant ReadyNAS seem to be highly
recommended.
Walter
On Mar 31, 2008, at 2:22 PM, Keith Martin wrote:
PC World has the 1TB Western Digital My Book
network hard drive for £150. I’m not going to use
the Anywhere Access, just standard local network
connections. This is a possible contender…
Sometime around 31/3/08 (at 18:33 +0100) Trevor Reaveley said:
I have a LaCie 500gb ethernet mini disc, seems to do the job nicely.
Now if only I can work out how to share it with a pc!!
Ah. Does it connect using SMB? Or has LaCie sorted out direct
Mac-based network hard drive sharing? If so I’ll have to pass; the
Sonos hifi kit works with Windows shares.
I think so, but not really very up on networking. The letters SMB
ring a bell from somewhere though, maybe worth having a look at their
site.
The only reason I mention this one is because I have another 3 LaCie
drives and I’ve always found them very reliable…there…now I’ve
actually said it out loud they’ll all die within a day of each other!
On 31 Mar 2008, at 19:41, Keith Martin wrote:
Ah. Does it connect using SMB? Or has LaCie sorted out direct
Mac-based network hard drive sharing? If so I’ll have to pass; the
Sonos hifi kit works with Windows shares.
Yeah stay away from Lacie!!! Especially the really large 1TB drives. They have a monstrous reputation for crashing hard. And I have been caught out BIG time on this. Yup BIG. Took 6 months to recover the data, some of which is still lost.
Unfortunately if you want a really big drive capacity you’re going to have to get into some complicated back up. Best way of achieving this is with a raid. But which one?
