Gaiko :

I have been looking everywhere for reasonably cheap (cost wise) esata/
usb, 4bay, RAID 1 storage solutions and while there are some
undisputedly top notch options out there they seem to start at $500 on
up and none seem to support 2tb internal drives.

I happened upon one post in the smallnetbuilder forums about Addonics
(it is still hardly talked about on that forum). Their mini storage
tower seems to be about the form factor I need, the $200 price range
is ok and the option of integrated RAID 1, port multiplier, eSATA, and
USB seems just about right. But I can hardly find any reviews about
these storage towers.

So has anyone tried either the “Storage Tower” or the “Mini Storage
Tower” from Addonics? I would be curious to know about any of the
configurations, how they run especially the quality (parts etc did
anything break prematurely).

Any comments or experiences shared would really be appreciated!

Cheers

-Gaiko

I have not used those myself, but I had similar considerations last
year. My conclusion was to "roll my own", since storage boxes seem
overpriced to me and the software as delivered with the ones I was
investigating always was limited as opposed to what you can do
yourself. You'll need

- A cheap standard PC, processor does not matter at all, get something
like a Celeron or Sempron. Or check out Mini ITX boards with
integrated Celeron/Atom processors, they have become pretty cheap
(around 100$).

- If possible, get a motherboard with 4 Sata interfaces. If you go the
ITX route you'll only have 2 of them, but they normally have one free PCI
slot which allows you to add a 4 port Sata card, like the Promise
TX4. Most motherboards still have one parallel ATA-IDE interface,
which means you can add at least one more disk and/or DVD Rom that
way.

- Memory is not very important either, 512MB should be enough. The PC
enclosure must be big enough to fit all the disks you need,
obviously. An onboard network controller is standard anyway
nowadays.

Install something like Ubuntu Server on the machine and use Linux
Software RAID in whatever configuration you desire. Don't worry about
the overhead of software RAID, you'll hardly notice it on a lightly
loaded server. Use Samba to share the RAID volumes on the network or
NFS or Rsync or any of the other numerous ways possible in Linux.

I know this is a little more work to begin with and in terms of
footprint you'll probably end up with a larger box but you gain the
flexibility that comes with using standard OS components and the total
cost including disks should be less than for a propriatary solution.


regards,

--

Joerg Lenneis

email: