Wednesday 16 June 2010

Latest Purchases


My quest for improving my PC set-up never ceases...which ends up costing me a bit, at least I rarely have to use my 'own' money as my internet earnings cover most of my purchases...
It's not like I have the latest CPUs and Motherboards, but I do like to build new systems from scratch using old components, then add big hard-drives and plenty of RAM... currently I have two socket 939 board systems, one with a 2.2GHz single core, and one with a 2.0GHz dual core. I have a USB back-up hard-drive on each machine, but they are both pretty much full now. There is a 250GB backup drive on one, and a 150GB backup drive on the other.
I spotted a NAS (network attached storage drive) system some time ago, and have been interested ever since. The NAS works as extra storage just like a USB drive, except that it is connected via the network router and is therefore available to the whole network. Not only that, but some of them have USB ports so that USB drives can be added, plus many of them offer options for remote access. I tracked some on eBay and ended up with the IcyBox (pictured) this one takes two SATA drives (I also got 2 x 400GB drives from eBay), plus it has two USB ports to accomodate my existing USB drives which will give ne a total storage solution of 1.2TB. You can set up the IcyBox to RAID settings so that one drive is backed up by the other, but my intention is only to use the system to back up my PC's, so I don't really need to back up my back up!
I intend to use the system as a server for some files that I want to share over the network, so it will be interesting to see if that will work as I want it to. I am also quite excited about the internet access features, particularly if I can use it to host files that I use for websites - in theory, I could place all my blog pictures on there which would mean that I no longer needed to upload pictures...
I will post about how this new 'solution' works out in practice, so far I can only report that the 'refurbished' model that I bought looks cosmetically pretty much perfect, and the English version of the manual is not the best translation I have ever seen - hopefully the product itself and it's associated software will be fairly intuitive and I won't need to refer to the manual much..

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