Recommendations for External hard Drive Wanted

[AggieMike88]

Can you guys provide some recommendations for an external HDD? I need it to serve as a central hard drive for company documents and files that my staff need to access. A server is overkill for my needs since I just need storage.

SPEC's = .5 to 1 Terabyte, hooks on to my LAN via Ethernet connection, easy to install, easy to get workstations to find it.

If you guys cans supply makes, models, suppliers/sources, and approx price, that would very helpful.

Thanks!!

 

[EdFred]

I bought a Maxtor 1TB from a box store that connects to the LAN. Probably could have got a better deal on Newegg, but I wanted it that day.

 

[weilke]

Iomega StorCenter. They are part of EMC.

They come in 1,2 and 4TB and hook to the network. You just mount the directories on your various workstations and it is transparent to the users. Internally, they have a RAID1 configuration, your data is basically mirrored on two separate drives in case one goes tu.

roughly $300 for 1TB , $450 for 2TB and $600 for 4TB.

 

[TMetzinger]

As the others have noted, you want a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. Do NOT buy some no-name product as the "server" built into the enclosure is often flaky. Buffalo, ioMega, Maxtor, Linksys all make good products.

 

[Bob Noel]

At the higher end would be something like the LaCie 5big. A five disk NAS with a variety of RAID options. The version with 5 1 TB drives is about $850 at
pc connection. I recently bought one for home use so I don't have enough
experience with it for an assessment of its reliability.

 

[jsstevens]

And don't forget some kind of backup. The early ones had nothing for backup at all. I don't know if the newer ones do, but you want something.

And rememebr - backup is bought for catastrophic failures but is most often used because someone deletes something. Or overwrites something or etc.

John

 

[EppyGA]

At the higher end would be something like the LaCie 5big. A five disk NAS with a variety of RAID options. The version with 5 1 TB drives is about $850 at
pc connection. I recently bought one for home use so I don't have enough
experience with it for an assessment of its reliability.

Another candidate on the high would be the DROBO units by Data Robotics. They don't care what size drives you put in when, they figure it out and configure appropriately.

 

[silver-eagle]

I have a netgear box (SC101) and a linksys box (NAS200). Both attach to the lan but the netgear uses special software and I've managed to trash both drives a couple of times.

The linksys supports two drives up to 1T each and has two USB ports on the backend for flash drives and/or another USB drive. The linksys can be accessed via IP address with no special software. Lots of options here. You can define individual users, space limits, separate drives or one single view, and RAID (I thought).

Neither comes with drives so you get to chose your own.