The price on that 1Tb LaCie has really come down.

I am having someone come over next week to pull some Cat5 into the closet in my office. I'm planning to run the cable to my main machine with another outlet near the Tivo and a third in the kid's room.

I think I need a second generation Tivo to be able to download shows from it? I have a DirecTivo from a couple of years ago, so do I need to upgrade that?

Thanks for all the suggestions. AFter the cable is run, I will go shopping for the storage solution.

Welcome.

Remember its not an archival tool like tapes.

Cat 5? Make sure you using Cat 5e...shouldn't make that much cost difference as your runs are short.

I'm not a physical network guy. Is Cat 6 a standard and available now?

The LaCie cannot be networked. There is a new solution from Netgear that might work. It is the SC101. It is merely an enclosure that does not come with any drives so you can put as large of a drive as you want. Plus it can be hooked to a networked and accessed from any computer. It can be had for $99 plus the cost of the drives.

Cat 6 is easily available.

I thought the drives were going onto a workstation.

Fine. then go with the buffalo. check this out

$700 after rebate. NAS
http://shop4.outpost.com/product/4350515

enjoy.

Ordered the Infrant ReadyNAS NV bare, plus a couple of $125 320 Gb drives for a total of a little over $1K.

About .6T of storage, scalable to about 1.2T assuming the same drive size.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I actually had a conversation recently with the CEO of a small data back-up and archiving company based in Switzerland. He mentioned that we are approaching a crisis, since so many people/companies were archiving pictures, movies, music and other data on CD/DVD ROM. Apparently the lifetime of these media is only a few years, as the materials degrade even when stored properly (some faster than others, depending on quality. So, unlike the Kodak snapshots that got thrown in a box and 50 years later are still viewable, millions of family pictures, home movies and the like may just disappear, or be virtually unrecoverable over time. And 99% of us think our data is safe and stored forever.

I am not sure about the physics of this, but I do have several old CD ROMs that look pretty ratty, and they are just sitting on a spindle in my home office. Anybody have any experience with this?

fduvall

[QUOTE=Efrem]Since you're not talking about dynamically changing data, but about static (albeit very large) files, I take issue with your original statement about there not being a simple backup strategy. There is. Get twice the storage you need, which you'd have to do for RAID Level 1 anyhow, and make copies of everything. If you don't want to buy another humongous disk drive, burn DVDs instead.QUOTE]

I agree with you on that fact that the media does not have a very long life.
Even if it did have a very long life, I dont think you will be holding on to the
media which is more than a decade or two old. If the data is important
you would end up copying/transfering it to the newer media in the future
anyway.

How many floppy disks are you still have or use for your data archive?

A good strategy would be to have two offline backups stored in different
places. In case something happens to one, you still have the other copy.
And in my openion, if the data is critical, keep it spinning. Just make regular
offline backups to protect your data from some disaster... like hardware
failures, human errors or data corruptions.

so....

Amazon has

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digita...992647?ie=UTF8

><corrected linl<>

Firewire 2.0 and USB 2.0

1TB and external cases...fine enough to hook up to any computer and also easy to move off-site.

1TB for $400USD *shaking head*

I think you posted the wrong link.

Oopss

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digita...992647?ie=UTF8

Anyone see an alternative to the Netgear SC101.

It $80 dollars and looks to be the ticket for my no-hassle friend, but it only is 10/100.

Netgear shows a T version, but its not out and no price indications.

Any alternatives that are cheap and do gig ethernet?

been researching and looks like the SC101 is bad...requires client software on each PeeCee.

Post to let everyone know that my Infrant ReadyNAS is working like a charm. Pretty easy to set up, too.

I have it configured in RAID 5 with about 900 megs of net storage (from a gross of ~1.2T).

>I have it configured in RAID 5 with about 900 megs of net storage (from a gross of ~1.2T).

Ouch, that is quite a storage hit...

Joking aside, I will probably end up buying the Infrant, I'm just gonna wait for Synologys Q1 announcement of their upgraded product line.

That's what you get from Raid 5. If it's going to survive the loss of a drive you need a drive's worth of redundancy.