Extra storage.

daveyuk

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If you're looking for some extra storage space for your growing collection of photo's. Then may I recomend USB Tech as I ordered the following drive from them.

250gb 3.5 USB portable hard drive M250-3572 @£82.84 including P&P

http://www.usbtech.co.uk

Ordered on Thursday of last week and received it yesterday a very quick no fuss service.
 
I'll be getting something similar to that soon mrgrubby - click!.
Well, I already have it - just need to get some drives in it now!
Won't actually be used for more than one machine, I just prefer to use it over USB.
 
Hoodi - let me know how the Netgear performs. I have a Buffalo Terrastation which is s-l-o-w. Some of that is due to the RAID but I think a lot is because even 100BaseT network is much slower than, say, USB. It's fine for backups but I wouldn't want to work on large files off it.

I'm upgrading the network to gigabit today and I'm hoping that will fix it.
 
250Gb LaCie USB2 HDD for £69.99 inc VAT here
 
Have to say I like the idea of the network drive with print server. Would stop the 'I want to print something is the computer on?' questions :)

MrGubby (see I got it right;) ) can you just plug a usb printer into the buffalo unit - and is it any slower than a normal network file transfer in use?

edit: This one looks quite good ..... just tested my link and the site seems to have crashed :) Anyway it's a WD 500Gb NAS with print server and backup software for about £200
 
JonathanRyan said:
Hoodi - let me know how the Netgear performs. I have a Buffalo Terrastation which is s-l-o-w. Some of that is due to the RAID but I think a lot is because even 100BaseT network is much slower than, say, USB. It's fine for backups but I wouldn't want to work on large files off it.

I'm upgrading the network to gigabit today and I'm hoping that will fix it.

Have been using two of those Netgear SC101's for over a year now, here's a simple summing up from my experience with them.

Pros:
The price
You supply your own drives, meaning you can build it to suit.
Near silent (when accessing), is silent when idle.
Simple to setup.
Drive mirroring

Cons:
You have to use a stupid Netgear frontend for access, although if you do this on one PC and you can share it as another drive - cant just plug it in and give it an IP address.
Gets warm - not been a problem yet, but it does get noticeably hot.
Only has a 100Mbit connection, 1Gbp as an option would have been a good idea.
Uses a native drive format - not sure how easy this maybe be if the PSU failed or something relatively simple and you needed the data off the disks.
Regular updates (This could be a pro or a con - shows good support, but can be a nuissance in their frequency).

Roughly sums up my opinions of these units, have these running for over a year without any problems, good for the price, simple to use, have their niggles, but generally satisifed:thumbs:
 
What kind of transfer speeds are you getting?

It's not that I'm obsessed or anything :nuts: but I have been VERY disappointed with my Terrastation. Yesterday I upgraded the LAN so I did some timings - they really aren't great.

To transfer 1.2GB from fast internal hard drive to the Terrastation used to take 7mins 45s on 100 BaseT. Now I'm on gigabit I was hoping for <1min but it's only down to about 4mins 30s. Going the other way is less than 3 mins so I can tell the Raid is slowing it down a bit but really I'd hoped for a LOT better.
 
Times Im getting through a 100Mbit LAN are as follows

For 2Gb Mpeg file:

From SC101 to PC: 5m 20s
From PC to SC101 : 6m 19s
From PC HDD to 2nd PC HDD: 1m 00s

HDDs in the PC are standard 7,200RPM 8Mb SATA150 drives.
While the drives in the SC101 are standard 7,200RPM ATA100 drives.
(All Hitachi's)

Not blistering, but adequate as a backup container :)
 
RobertP said:
MrGubby (see I got it right;) ) can you just plug a usb printer into the buffalo unit - and is it any slower than a normal network file transfer in use?

My Buffalo unit seems to hate Elements , browsing is sloooow until it's created the thumbnails for that folder but it's ok after that :thinking: . Printing is just a plug-in & set windows to use network printer .

//edit//

Warspite , if you look at your network stats , how much bandwidth is being used during file transfer ???
 
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