Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

The Rule of 3 Drives: How to Build your Next PC

<< < (7/9) > >>

f0dder:
The speed would be horrible over NAS. SMB is crud. However, you can easily attach it to an existing piece of network equipment if you want NAS. Almost any existing NAS has USB ports for external drives. And, I assume, if you need a NAS, you already have a network, stick it on a server. If you don't have any of those then grab a new ASUS or D-Link wireless appliance and start hanging stuff off of that. The latter is what I do.
-tinjaw (January 07, 2008, 06:24 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yeah, SMB/CIFS is pretty horrible, I normally seem to get ~25MB/s on a gigabit LAN, sometimes if I'm lucky I can get 30-35MB/s. FTP'ing from a file that's 100% in filesystem cache with ramdisk as destination gives me ~80MB/s stable, and raw benchmarking gives me ~925mbit/s. So it's safe to say that v1 of SMB/CIFS for high-speed networks... can't wait until samba support CIFSv2 though, even if you'd have to upgrade clients to Vista SP1 to get advantage of it :/

What does drobo run internally? Linux w/kernel software raid?
-f0dder (January 07, 2008, 03:02 AM)
--- End quote ---

"Drobo OS", with which they've been fairly close-lipped about the details.  At least they were when I looked at the Drobo.
-Liquidmantis (January 07, 2008, 08:53 AM)
--- End quote ---
Sounds fishy... I find it hard to believe they rolled their own, since most other vendors tend to use a linux kernel.

tinjaw:
Curisoity.....which appliance do you use?-johnfdeluca (January 07, 2008, 06:31 PM)
--- End quote ---

I have a D-Link DSM-G600.

I bought it a couple years ago and haven't felt the need to upgrade. This also means that I am not up to date on what is out there. But I do remember thinking about getting an ASUS WL-700gE.

They have N wireless and background downloading of bittorrents, HTTP, and FTP. So you can hookup your laptop, have the appliance start downloading some large files and then disconnect your laptop and the appliance will download the files while you sleep or leave the house for work or school.

ghacks:
Interesting topic. I plan to get one of those SSD drives for my operating systems. The prob is they are really expensive right now and you have to know which one to buy because there are old and new models. Makes this kinda complicated. I for one will wait until reliable benchmarks are available.

f0dder:
Interesting topic. I plan to get one of those SSD drives for my operating systems. The prob is they are really expensive right now and you have to know which one to buy because there are old and new models. Makes this kinda complicated. I for one will wait until reliable benchmarks are available.
-ghacks (January 11, 2008, 08:46 AM)
--- End quote ---
The benchmarks available right now are reliable, and they show... that unless you really need the "no moving parts", power consumption (or really need the random-seek performance) aspects of SSDs, they're not worth the price, yet.

But in a couple of years, prices should have dropped and technology should have improved so much that they beat regular HDDs in all ways... and I'm looking forward to that :)

app103:
I'd like to add this suggestion, from my recent experiences:

Make sure that you also have a plan as for what you are going to do if the pc dies and you have 3 perfectly good hard drives full of data. Be sure your backup PC can handle those drives, or your data could end up being held hostage by the hardware and/or OS limitations of your backup machine.

My old pc is no longer suitable as a backup machine. Back in the days when my main PC ran the same OS as the backup machine and all my HD's were PATA, FAT32, and 80G or less, it was fine, but not any more. None of the hard drives from my main pc can be used with it. Can't use SATA in it and can't use large HD's over 137G (OS limitations). And all those DVD's I burned are a bit useless when the optical drive in the backup machine is a CD-ROM that won't read burned CD's, nevermind DVD's of any type, burned or not. And it doesn't have (and can't have) USB, so any external drives are also useless.

So either make sure the old pc you keep as a backup machine can handle the hard drives from your main pc (and your burned disks), and buy/build yourself a low end machine that can, if it can't. This goes for the OS on the backup machine as well. Make sure it can handle what you have.

I am sure glad I used offsite storage I can access online, for some of my data that wasn't already copied to the backup PC, that doesn't rely on hardware or OS for me to retrieve it. It was the smartest backup I ever did.

Oh, and for you laptop users, if you are relying on a desktop PC as your backup machine, make sure you have a way to use that little HD from the laptop with it, and if you are relying on another laptop as a backup machine, a way to connect a 2nd little laptop HD to it.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page