[ale] Need a big external drive quick. Suggestions?

[Jim Popovitch]

Greg Freemyer wrote:
> On 6/1/06, Jim Popovitch <jimpop at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Frankly, I would dump the USB idea and use a network (NAS/SAN)
>> device/drive.  You can pick up a cheap NAS (enclosure + bios etc) for
>> less than $100 at Microcenter or Frys.  Throw your hard drive in that
>> and get your data backed up much faster.
>>
>> Even better, pop the top and drop the second drive in it if you can
>> spare some downtime.
>>
>> -Jim P.
> 
> I'm not familiar with the cheap enclosures, but there is not a 1 TB
> drive yet, so you have to have Raid 0 (stripping) support to get a TB.
> 
> Same problem with connecting it directly to the IDE chain.
> 
> Fry's also has a Buffalo NAS Server with a TB.  Why do you think that
> would be faster?  I've never sent large volumes of data to a NAS
> server, but I can get 4 GB/min to a SATA 150, 3 GB/min to a ATA/100,
> and IIRC 2 GB/min to USB 2.
> 
> For all the above I'm doing a pure dd from the raw drive to a capture
> file.  Same as I plan to do Saturday.

I tested some NAS and USB drives about 3 or 4 months ago.  The NAS 
drives had better performance (100mb nics) than the USB drive.  This 
wasn't a scientific test, I just rsync,ed some files from drive A to 
drive B for USB  vs drive A to host B for NAS.  NAS certainly seemed 
faster with 10GB of data, unfortunately the prices of GB ethernet NAS 
devices was outside of my budget so I bought I second-hand laptop with 
an intel e1000 compatible device, and used it.

-Jim P.