an external hard drive connects to a computer (usually via USB ) and needs a computer running to serve the files to other computers.
The files aren't available unless the computer its connected to is running.
Also, a single external drive has no redundancy. If the drive dies, your backup is dead.
finally, the performance of a shared drive running behind windows isn't that great. Not that big of an issue, especially if wireless laptops are accessing the shared drive (wifi is really slow compared to everthing wired).
I set a raid at my business years ago and it has worked flawlessly for well over 5 year. (knock on wood) It is in a standalone case with it's own power supply and runs off of a pc. I have been rally happy with it. About the only downside is that the drives are only about 7gigs. From there I back up to CD.
funny you should post this. i was just talking to heidi about this. we've been looking at something simple and i think the winner in our home will go with the netgear 500gig nas removable hdd. the cool thing about that is its already set up to image the first drive once you slide a second drive in. no having to configure the raid yourself. then once its full pop in another drive and keep on truckin. more than likely go to a terrabit drive once the 500 is full. we have lots of photos and music. its also compatible with the ps3 so i can stream video, music and photos without turning heidis pc on. also it is a print server so i dont have to have heidis cpu on when i want to print from my laptop. 😎
I have no need for a print server. I run a wired print server off of my wifi network direct to a parallel port. (HP Jet direct printer port). I think it was 15 bucks on eBay.
"Dan-H" wrote: I was looking at the exact same setup.
I have no need for a print server. I run a wired print server off of my wifi network direct to a parallel port. (HP Jet direct printer port). I think it was 15 bucks on eBay.
😂 thats what we used to use at work before they actually started buying printers with them built in. it sucked because they stick out depending on where the parallel port was located. ours were big too. kind of like a small ethernet hub. 😂
I've been using a Maxtor Shared Storage network attached drive & print server. It's not the fastest thing around but it's worked well for a few years now. It doesn't have raid, but I use is as a second level backup anyways so it doesn't matter too much.
I backup our laptops to a Linux server. The linux server backs up to the Maxtor Shared Storage drive.
I just back up everything on a portable hard drive that I lock in my safe. Is that a bad thing?
If backup only was my concern that might work. the risk is your backup drive in your safe decides to stop working, or part of the drive becomes corrupt and you don't learn this until you need it to restore something you lost.
Backup to CDs or DVDs is also possible (what I do now) but I've got a pile of them lying around.
another approach is network backups to some provider on the internet, but I don't want my data just "out there".
