wrote in message
I’ve been looking for a way to store gigabytes of photos external to my laptop, preferably network-attached.
I don’t want to bash this product as it does fit some applications well, but my experience loading photos stored on a WD Worldbook is way too slow. About 20 times longer than a photo on a local hard drive.
Maybe the way to go is ESATA attached disk, but before I go there, is anyone getting good results using an affordable network storage device in a home office environment? e.g., something in the $1,500 range or below?
Sam
Sam,
This is going to sound like overkill but I’ve put together two backup systems that have worked flawlessly for almost a year now. One is in my office, the other is at a clients business.
I use Windows Home Server (WHS) see NewEgg for pricing and reviews. Along with an old PC or build a new server (headless) one for around $500. You can also take a look at HP’s Media Smart Server selections which use the WHS software.
The two I built included a SATA drive cage so I can add/swap hard drives. There are plenty of options for adding more drives both internally or external USB or eSATA drives all for well within your budget.
The big advantage here is that WHS and a small router can connect to all your home PC’s and it is even accessible over the internet via VPN. It makes backup images of your entire system(s) and will allow backups of up to 10 PC’s. You can access and recover individual files that have been stored should you loose them on your PC and it’s a media server. When your PC crashes and becomes unbootable (and one day it will…) simply boot from the WHS Recover CD and recover the PC from a backup image in just minutes.
I have mine setup here in the office to do a backup every night. Just put your PC in Stby mode (to save power, etc.) and WHS will wake it up and do the backups as per the schedule you set.
You can download WHS from the MS site and use it as a trial for 60 day’s as I recall. It’s not a limited version so there’s no restrictions.
I also have an eSATA drive connected to my main workstation dedicated for storing photo’s. It also gets backed-up by WHS. You could also use GHOST or Norton Save and Restore as alternative solutions. Since my PC’s are also used for CAD and have all my business records on them, I use both WHS and Norton. Norton makes an image and stores it locally, WHS makes an image of everything on these PC’s and stores it on the server. The business records also get burned to DVD.
Like most, I too have had Windows get corrupted and/or a virus got through the defenses and since I’ve installed this solution, I have not lost a single file. I can recover my laptop in about 15 mins but my main workstation (with 8 hard drives) takes about 45 mins to do a full restore. Compare that with the 12+ hours it used to take to rebuild my system from scratch and WHS and the hardware has paid for itself several times over this past year.
Bob S.