Originally Posted by
pierre mclopez
Not quite on topic, but perhaps germane.....
I'm dealing with a similar issue: two computers and wanting to share and backup data. However, I'm using ethernet for DSL, printer and the two computers through a Linksys workgroup switch. This makes NAS (Network accessed storage) a logical choice. As I've researched, a NAS storage appliance with a single hard drive would work. However, to "future-proof" the job, I'm looking at a NAS enclosure with RAID and a couple of hard drives. RAID allows the NAS hard drives to coordinate in a number of different ways, including total redundancy.
You might want to take a look at this:
http://thinclientforum.com/nas.htm
Right now, I'm running two Raid-1 arrays of 1 terabyte each on a single thin client. The drives run at 3.0 gbps (SATA) and the thin client has a gigabit NIC, making the whole thing fly on my LAN. Total cost for the four eSATA drives was around $500, the thin client another $250 and $180 for eSATA PCIe card. The system also runs my FTP server, so I can access everything on the two 1-terabyte RAID arrays remotely on the internet, as well as through standard Windows file sharing. I could also have set the system in other configurations, e.g. 4 terabytes of striped storage, etc. However, I wanted the extra security of having all my data fully mirrored, so I configured it as 2 terabytes in two separate RAID 1 arrays.
$900 for a versatile, fully-programmable, fully-configurable RAID array ain't bad.