Looking For A Raid External System

[mouse]

that is able to provide either 1TB, 1.5TB or more storage for my network. Found a fantastic example by both Iomega (1TB Triple InterfaceUltraMax Hard Drive) and then a company called LaCie. (LaCie Ethernet Disk RAID 2TB) Both systems are not cheap reaching into the $1,000 or above area, but, I want to avoid the 100% duty on the item coming into LOS, so I need a dealer in LOS. Checked all to no avail and with contact information I am getting the famous "we no have"

Can anyone tell me what is available in Bangkok or elsewhere.

Never mind....found something close enough at Thanni.

Edited January 21, 2007 by mouse

[autonomous_unit]

Amusingly, these things are just low-budget computers running Linux. If you have anybody with Linux skills to help, you could just buy a cheap and fast PC with a larger case to stuff drives into. The end result would be a faster server, most likely with better cooling to protect the disks, and the ability to run other basic services as well down the road. It is also arguably more secure because you can keep the server current with security patches, whereas most of these appliances end up running very out-dated software. But if it is all running behind a firewall it might not matter to you...

These things just run a trimmed down Linux version with regular Linux filesystems on the disks, software RAID, and NFS, FTP, and/or SMB services.

The cheapest way is one of the "corporate" motherboards which have pretty much everything you need on the motherboard: SATA and IDE controllers, gigabit LAN, and onboard video so you can hook up a monitor to configure the thing initially. A mid-range Athlon64 CPU will have more horsepower than the little processors in those storage appliances, and from what I have read, the main performance limiter on those systems is the processor rather than the gigabit ethernet or disks themselves.