Sunday, July 29, 2007

Easy Terabyte Network Attached Storage


I came across an article in PC magazine a while back talking about this new company –Hammer Storage. John Dvorak, the columnist, was mentioning what a great piece of backup hardware they made called ‘myshare”. “Myshare” is a network attached storage (NAS) device in the very reasonable $429 range.

NAS is very convenient when you have a number of workstations needing access to the same data – like image files. I thought I would give it a try and, so far have been quite happy with the results. It was fairly easy to set up – about 15 minutes – and when I ran into one “hitch” the company’s tech support was quick to pick up the phone and resolve the issue. That was a pleasant experience in this digital day and age.

We have it plugged into our gigabyte switch and can easily access our data quickly over the network. I set up the drive as a stand- alone 1 terabyte drive. The device can also be set up as RAID 0 (Stripe), 1 (Mirror), JBOD (Span) configurations.

I chose not to set the drive up as a "RAID" device with the data redundancy built in, but when it is coupled with another "myshare" drive for backup, it becomes a pretty reasonable solution for data integrity. I'll talk about some back-up solutions in an upcoming newsletter.

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