Seagate External USB Hard Drives

We've had a home network for a long time now, and I've tried a bunch of different ways to store our pictures, music and other family stuff. After yet another RAID disaster that took a week to recover from, I think I've finally hit on the ideal home storage solution: a cheap server PC and external usb hard drives.

What I realized is that these drives are now cheap, fast and big enough to totally hold all of our stuff. The picture above is from my server closet (which, by the way, is really a closet, not some fancy pants rack system). It shows our 160GB drives, but the technology is actually moving so fast I don't think you can buy those anymore --- Amazon currently has a 300GB model for just over $200. Holy crap!

So here's the setup: get a cheap desktop box from Circuit City or whatever (I used the Compaq SR1500NX because it was on sale the day I walked into Circuit City, but it doesn't really matter. Get two of these drives and plug them in. Share one out on the network for people to use. Then buy a simple drive mirroring tool (I used Easy2Sync, which does the job pretty well) and set it up to copy everything on your primary drive over to the other one on a nightly basis.

At this point you've got a sweet, low-cost network storage system that is surprisingly redundant. PC dies? Get another one and plug the hard drives into it. Bing! One of the drives dies? Get another one and do a full copy from the surviving one. Bing! Need more storage? Buy another pair of USB drives --- if you run out of USB ports you can get a hub for almost nothing.

I still burn DVDs of our really important stuff and stick them in the family safe deposit box once in awhile in case of catastrophe. But I couldn't be more pleased with my little network server over in the closet. I love it when things make sense and just work!