1TB Arrays: Stack ’em High, Sell ’em Cheap

PC World’s review of 1TB disk boxes makes some important points.

• “With every drive we tested, we found setup easy and straightforward. The biggest differences in setup involved the connection interface and the drive configuration options (for features like RAID settings, folder sharing, and access permissions).”
• Iomega only offers RAID 0 on their XL Desktop product – a no-no for business data.
• Even the slowest NAS box moved data over Gigabit Ethernet at almost 10MB/sec. Unless you are chunking out GB+ files you’ll find that acceptable.
• Not surprisingly, Direct Attach Storage is 2-6x faster than NAS. If you really need speed, and you know who you are, DAS is the way to go.
• There are no particular price differences between NAS and DAS.
• List prices range from $0.80 to $1.33/GB

The most interesting result though is that if performance isn’t your critical factor, any of these units will do the job, so you may as well buy on price. For business use I like the Buffalo Technologies TeraStation Pro, with its easily swapped hard drives, and a street price of a little over $800.

I’ll be interested to see which of these shows up in my local Office Max first. They are almost cheap enough to be a good product for them.