Travel Technology - External Hard Drive with RAID, DHCP Server and 4 Gigabit ports? Does this exist?

I will soon have to do some work on site with a small team of 3 or 4 people. We all have laptops, but this project requires very large data sets (could be up to 15 GB). Total storage requirement might be up to 200 GB.

It is important that we can share the work easily, and that it is safe.

I wonder whether there is a product that has two hard drives in RAID-0 configuration, and includes a switch with a DHCP server so that we can easily all connect to the drive.

Or would we need to get two separate products - one Gigabit router/switch, and a networked hard drive with RAID?

In the past I have used a NAS unit attached to a Gigabit switch and use a similar configuration my home (and remote facilities as well).

Not a bad option and there are some great deals on NAS units these days.

A few thoughts come to mind.

Considering the large data volumes, you may be better considering a router (to provide DHCP afor IP addresses) to which you would connect a separate 1000MBit switch to which you would in turn connect the NAS and all the laptops. In fact: Why do you need DHCP at all? You can manually configure the PCs to all work on the same range of IP addresses.

On the other hand, I can't think of a single off-the-shelf NAS appliance which could cope with 15-200Tbytes and not need a rack.

If I really needed that sort of volume, I would look into building my own storage "server", possibly using freeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/).


Also could you clarify the "safe" requirement? Do you mean that you need a means of backing-up this volume of data?

15-200Tbytes GB luckily, not TB!

I'd firstly recommend NOT using RAID0 if the data is important, in fact I don't use RAID0 even if data isn't important. For 200GB you really don't need or want RAID0, as the data will have a 50% higher chance of being gone forever if only one drive died.

You may consider something like the readynas 2x500GB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822122004

no it doesn't have 4 gigabit ports, but you can pickup a gigabit switch that will far outlast most any NAS system for less. Sometimes the more you cram in a box, the more problems it is likely to have.

GB luckily, not TB!

Gosh - How did I mis-read that so wrong? Sorry.

You still haven't said what you meant by "safe".

I would definitely separate the switch from the NAS. I would also buy a separate USB or E-Sata disk to which I would make regular backups of the data.

I'd go with RAID5 for the storage.

Personally, even if this did exist I think I would like to keep the two things seperate. I like being able to have a bit of redundancy, and I also like having the switch seperate since I can focus on quality (like jumbo frame support) and size, like EIGHT ports, and then I can also turn OFF the NAS when I am away for a long time (I have all these of devices going into one power strip and then I just have one switch that I shut-off and one that stays on)

Wirelessly posted (Blackberry 8700: BlackBerry8700/4.2.1 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/120)

Thanks guys for the suggestions. It seems like LaCie has a RAID system with 4 disks that could be run in RAID5+Spare. This would mean that 2 disks can fail without data loss.

Then I would just need something like my 4 port ADSL WLAN Router minus the ADSL and the WLAN plus Gigabit Ethernet. We might get an internet connection too, so this could be useful.

OK, ordered the 1 TB LaCie Ethernet Disk RAID €570:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10877

I also got a D-Link Gigabit switch so I guess that should work. Let's see, we will be using it the week after next.