I want to buy/build a 1Terabyte NAS with RAID?

Question

I want to buy/build a 1Terabyte NAS with some kind of raid arrangement for storing audio & video. I have looked at some of the netgear products such as the storage central SC101T or ReadyNAS but they are expensive. I have seen 1T drives from CompUSA for $89 which I could use to build this.
And of course I want to have some RAID arrangement so I will not loose my audio/video files.

Any suggestions on what to buy and what RAID arrangement would you suggest?

Thanks

Answer 1

Hey Michael,



One of the "safer" ways to do this is to avoid hardware RAID configs and use software raid. So you get get 2 x 1Tb drives and set them up in a mirror raid volume.



I would also recommend keeping the OS and the RAID drives (or partitions) seperately, so you can move the raid volume to another PC in case of catastrophic hardware failure (and not worry about a hardware RAID container / volume :)



If you are going to do windows, just plug the disks in and set them up as a dynamic volume and choose mirror when you create it.



Basic Storage Versus Dynamic Storage in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343



How to create a mirrored volume on a remote Windows 2000-based computer in Windows XP-based computer

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307880



Linux, by nature, is a bit more complex



Managing RAID and LVM with Linux (v0.5)

http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/raid-lvm.php



Setting up software RAID in Ubuntu Server

http://advosys.ca/viewpoints/2007/04/setting-up-software-raid-in-ubuntu-server/



If you can't get or don't have dedicated OS drives, you can at least create smaller partitions for the OS on one (or both) drives, say 15~20gb, then use the remainder for the data RAID.





cheers

Answer 2

buybuild 1terabyte nas raid

Answer 3

It's kinda hard to raid the pregnancy question, it's not easy thinking of the questions but go back into that section and answer my new one!