Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > January > 30 > Entry
The storage solution (I hope)
Peek into the horrifying mind of a tech gadget geek! This is what I’ve been thinking about the last few months.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for the Statesman about keeping your data safe via network-attached storage and off-site storage. It’s sort of become an obsession with me since late last year and as the story developed, I had in my mind the idea of a perfect storage gadget that would do three things:
- Keep your data backed up and safe. Redundancy within the device itself (say, across multiple hard drives) would be a plus.
- The ability to stream whatever’s on that storage devices to other parts of the house, like say an Apple TV or an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 hooked up to an HDTV. It would also be nice to be able to access the device from outside the home, say through a private FTP address.
- It would be able to connect to an off-site backup service like Amazon’s S3, Carbonite or something like that to have a duplicate of data in case of fire, theft, food, etc.
The results of that search are what’s in the article, but as for my own home storage needs, I’m still not there, despite all the work I did researching.
In our home, we have a Windows XP desktop computer that doesn’t play nice with other computers on our home network. We have a Macbook and an older iBook G4. We have digital photos scattered across all three computers as well as documents and videos. I’ve tried to make the XP computer the primary one for storage (it has the biggest hard drive space) and do a backup to an external hard drive from that computer regularly.
We only have one external hard drive and it’s not big enough to accommodate the laptop, so only the XP computer is regularly backed up. I’ve been able to stream content from that computer to the Xbox and PS3 downstairs, but as of late it’s been giving me problems.
After looking at all the options, we decided to buy a Drobo. I’ve thought them overpriced, but Amazon has an offer for a base unit at $420 plus a $50 rebate, bringing it down to $370. That’s without hard drives, though. I had to buy two of them separately. Luckily, Newegg.com was having a sale for $99, free shipping. It was a good deal all around. It’s the newer model, which has a Firewire 800 connection, which is faster than USB, at least if you have a computer that supports it. We probably have a Mac computer in our future with that port, so it seemed like a good investment.
A couple of small problems: the Drobo itself can’t be networked without a $200 add-on called “DroboShare” that hasn’t been well-reviewed and which I’m not willing to buy, at least not at the moment. From what I’ve read, it seems slow and maybe not well-suited for video streaming, especially not for HD video.
We have an Apple Airport Express router with a USB connection that would put the Drobo on the home network. Unfortunately, the way the router does the AppleDisk networking won’t allow the drive to be recognized by the Xbox or PS3 for streaming (something about “UPNP” something or other). For that, I’d need a separate network adapter or to keep a computer on to work as the server (not desirable; I don’t want to keep a computer on all the time just for that purpose). I’d like a more energy-efficient solution.
My dad, who has a lot of experience with home networks, has offered his assistance, so I’ll let you know how this big project goes. I just ordered the Drobo and the drives last night. There’s a lot of work ahead; I’ll have to create separate partitions for each of the computers I want to backup and figure out the best way to consolidate our photos and videos into one centralized location as well. And I haven’t even thought about how I’ll use Time Machine with my Macbook.
We’ll have less than 1 terrabyte of room to play with (Drobo’s redundancy uses up a lot of disk space, but makes it very easy to add a third or fourth drive later if we need it. As we shoot HD camcorder video and take photos of our kid, I know that our needs are just going to grow. Buying one external hard drive was only going to be a temporary solution.
I’ll let you know how it goes, but if any of you have experience with this sort of monster data project, I’d love some advice or to hear about your own experiences.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment Categories: Gadgets, Shopping, TV
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By Omar Gallaga
February 2, 2009 1:33 PM | Link to this
Giovanni -- I haven't heard anything beyond what's been on the gadget blogs, but color me intrigued.
Sinda -- thanks! That's a great tip. I'm still waiting for mine to arrive and will let everyone know how it goes.
By giovanni gallucci
January 30, 2009 8:36 PM | Link to this
Omar,
I know this article may not be the place to ask, but have you heard rumblings about the Google drive? Just curious if you've heard anything more than a rumor about this service.
@giovanni
By sinda
January 30, 2009 7:43 PM | Link to this
Do you read Jon Armstrong, at Blurbomat? He's been twittering about his Drobo for some time now, and I think he posted about it too. I've got 2 PC laptops, one Mac, 3 external hard drives, 300 GB of music and 11k photos and NO good system.