Choosing a mass data storage solution for a mac household
I am replacing my old server / htpc with a mac mini – hopefully with a new model if they appear on 14.10.2008.
I am looking for a external mass data storage solution that offers me at least two terabytes of storage distributed among 2 or more drives in order to achieve a secure and redundant storage capacity of 1 terabyte without data loss in case of the inevitable hard disc failure.
I am looking for he following features – ordered by importance
1. Security through redundancy. I want to have all my data stored twice on two separate drives. Raid or regular back up software are both fine. I do not want to pay for backup software, there is enough free software to get the job done. It has to be automatic.
2. Noise – the system will be in my living room and I don’t want loud fans without running the risk of overheating. This is one of the main reasons I am dumpping my current pc.
3. Power management – I want the system to have some sort of idle state where the discs spin down on order to cut noise an usage of the discs. This should be automatic. I do not want to turn the drives of manually.
4. Accessability through out the entire network and over the internet – FTP is a big plus. I have a gigabit lan airport extreme base station and the mac mini that will always be on plus I also consider NAS an option.
5. replacability and expand ability. In case of a broken drive I want to be able to buy a new drive in a local compute store in install it. Even more important is that even though 1 terabyte is an insane amount of storage the day might come soon where I want to add more storage to the system without having to repurchase the entire setup.
6. Warranty - it should have decent warranty on the drives from the manufacturer.
8. Speed – I did a lot of reading and I think for my purposes of backup and media storage / streaming USB 2.0 and faster are good enough. FireWire would be nice since I have macs.
Things that ate not important.
1. Design – I can hide it all in a tv table so it does not have to be pretty.
2 .Many connectivity options – the system should be connected to my network only at one point – AEBS ,mac mini or via Ethernet.
3. right now I have two fairly new 500 gb SATA hard drives I would like to reuse but it’s not a must. I am willing to drop cash on new terabyte drives.
Most importantly the pricepoint. I figure I can get the 2 terabyte drives + enclosures for arround 350 euros which is about what I want to spend. But since this should be a longterm investment I could be convinced to spend a bit more.
These are the options I have in mind right now.
1. Buying two terabyte drives and putting them in decent enclosures, although I would not know which enclosures, and just hooking them up to the mini on 2 usb ports. –>probably the cheapest and can easily upgraded but problemantic in terms of noise and power management.
2. Getting a two bay raid enabled enclosure like the LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ Dual –> quite expensive – but excellent quality and feature rich. Are there cheaper options?
3. Getting a nas device like the dlink DNS 323. since I actually already have a mac mini always running or the airport extreme basestation I am not sure if its a good idea to bring in another stand alone device.
Please tell me what you suggest and about solutions you use for your self.