storage

[1984dc]

Hello all.

I have a hell of a lot of data (over 2tb and counting) and i was looking at storage options for backups etc. At the moment i have all my data spread across an array of hard disks and i am looking to get a large storage device to conglomerate my data and generally ease my complex and dis-organised system.

I am looking in the 8tb-10tb range (if i can save up the money!). I noticed that there where a lot of expensive raid hard drives available from various sources, which i´m presuming would act as a normal desktop hard drive. I have also seen that there seems to be a considerably cheaper option in
network storage units.

I am not sure if you can use these these network storage units to store normal data (documents,music,videos etc...) or it is just for specific network data. I was also curious as to whether these storage devices could be accessed by any computer using any operating system (I am running windows mac and linux, but i´m not familiar with linux server distributions).

Any advice on this would be great.

Many thanks in advance.

Dc
__________________
Boxes; Apple G5 Power-PC dual-processor 2.5 GHz /Compaq mini 311 Intel Atom 1.66Ghz
Storage; Serial-ATA Maxtor 233.76 GB/External Lacinema Classic multimedia hard drive/External Lacie 500g big disk/External WD 500g hard drive
Os's; Os x/Windows/Ubuntu/Ydl

 

[Crusha19]

That kind of storage is going to cost some serious cash. I think the cheapest option would be to build a box and throw a few 2TB drives in it. You could basically use it as network attached storage. If you run Ubuntu on it one option is to use Samba to share all of your files with the other computers.

I am not sure if Ubuntu is the best option, but it is what I am familiar with.

 

[1984dc]

Thanks Crusha19 that's an angle that i hadn't thought of and probably a fairly cheap option :)

I am still a little unsure of the compatibility of network storage devices and i would like to fully understand them before making my decision

 

[Crusha19]

I'm not really very familiar with NAS, but my understanding is that it just plugs into your router and then you can access it from any computer connected to the network. There will be some configuration obviously but it should be fairly simple.