Pat’s Point of View

Anyone of my generation or older will likely be amazed by the rapid (and continued) growth of personal computer technology. In particular the rise in hard disk capacities. And it’s all good; today’s personal computing requires massive amounts of storage space. No longer do we store the odd document, spreadsheet or work assignments. Nowadays we’re talking audio, video, photos…hundreds or thousands of megabytes. On sale for a mere few hundred dollars.

Bringing this situation into sharp focus for me, was the situation on our little home network. We’ve got two Macs, three iPods, the occasional PC and a printer. For various reasons, my little family has been purely digital for almost 8 years now, so that’s a lot of data. Rarely do we listen to CDs anymore, anything we want to listen to is MP3 o AAC. Similarly, our photos are all digital, usually enjoyed on-screen and only sometimes printed. As are home videos, which do get burnt to disc when I have time (I think I’m backlogged to somewhere in 2004). There are exceptions, but commercial video is mostly DVD. We haven’t yet taken the step to having an online movie library (when the wife’s not looking an Apple TV and gigabit router might suddenly appear and change this).

Isn’t it all wonderful? Isn’t it great that you can fit some much stuff?! Right up until a hard disk barfs it and you lose everything. Whilst this hasn’t happened to me in many years, I am acutely aware it could happen at any time. It could have happened just then. Or then. (I won’t push my luck)

For years I’ve been backing up my data onto DVD, at first 4.7GB at a time, and then with dual layer, about 9GB at a time. But this is a pain when you’re talking about hundreds of gigabytes of data. And the various drives in our collection were running out of space. I had to start using the spare space on my video iPod to store stuff that wouldn’t fit anywhere else. It was clear something better was needed.

The ideal solution would be a server, but I didn’t like the idea of even more IT junk lying around the house, nor the expense of buying a proper one. I could build one from old PC parts, but that’s too much like hard work and not necessarily any safer. So I thought NAS would be worth looking into.

Compared to even a few years ago, the products that are now available in the personal storage and NAS categories are numerous. I set about researching the possibilities and setting criteria:

• Enough space to last a good few years (250GB or more)
• Sits on the ethernet network to be accessible by any computer
• Must not require a computer to be running
• Must support Macintosh
• Small, quiet and low power consumption
• Reliable and protected (perhaps RAID mirroring)
• Print server and ‘media server’ are nice to have
• Not too expensive

I was dead-set on getting something that would offer higher protection than just having data sitting on a PC hard disk. So redundant disks was given a lot of weight, but became a real restriction. There are many business and enterprise solutions out there, but these are obviously too expensive. There are some multi-disk solutions for the small home office—from the likes of Lacie, Buffalo and Netgear—but they are just a bit too expensive. Further down the ladder there are some really ace products, especially:

• Buffalo TeraStation Home Server
• Netgear Storage Central SC101 (or SC101T)
• Western Digital My Book World Edition II
• Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition

Multiple terabytes are very tempting and these are some nice looking products (especially the little ‘piggy’ Netgear), but each had their issues. Getting proper support for Macs was the biggest issue, that counted most products out of the running. This uncovered some bizarre situations too, like the WD My Book: the ‘Studio edition’ is specifically for Macs, but uses only USB, not ethernet. The ‘World edition’ uses ethernet but doesn’t support Mac. Why can’t Mac uses have NAS?! (That said, I reckon they’ll sell heaps based purely on the looks and the massive capacities available for a great price).

So it seemed like I had an impossible combination of criteria. Even if I could find a product that supported my Macs and was on the network, they were pretty expensive—over a grand. Then I started to read some less than nice things about some of these products. For example, many people reported shockingly poor reliability (especially from the WD models) and the idea was raised that these devices run consumer hard disks ‘constantly’ as in a server, and that that probably wasn’t a good idea. They had a point. Even with RAID 0, what if both hard disks failed. Yes this was slightly paranoid (and pessimistic) thinking, but I didn’t fancy relying on a device to protect all this stuff (our digital memories!) only to have it fail. And from all reports, failure could occur remarkably quickly.

I had just about given up on finding a suitable solution, when Jenn came to my rescue. She made me tell her all the issues and then made me tell her what the ideal solution was. By the end I had realised what the solution was: don’t look for the magic bullet. If RAID wasn’t going to give us the protection we needed, then that meant we could open up the selection to any ethernet disks that supported Macs. Then we could find a separate USB disk as a backup drive that would mirror the NAS when we wanted a backup and then be taken offline for the rest of the time (to avoid unnecessary wear and tear). And both of these devices could be bought for about a third of the price of a RAIDed, Mac-proof NAS.

With a simple and effective solution in sight, we bought a Maxtor Shared Storage II 320GB for our NAS device, and a Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 (320GB) to act as a backup. Our regular backup consists of powering up the USB drive and running the NAS automated backup. It’s working well so far.

Next step is to upgrade to gigabit ethernet, so that things speed up a bit…and maybe stream video to our TV :)

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