Network Attached Storage

I finally bought myself a NAS (OK it's the second one I have bought, but the first one was rubbish! so this time I went for a proper brand-name system). It is second hand and winging it's way to me from eBay as I write...

I went for a Buffalo Terastation in the end as I found a reasonably-priced one, but would have liked a Netgear Readynas if they didn't command such high prices. The Terastation I have bought is supposedly in good working order but has no disks, which is perfect for me as I have a bunch of disks that I want to put into it. I now need to recover any of the data that I might want from these disks before the NAS arrives, that way I can start with blank disks and use the NAS as my future storage system.

I think it will take me a while to set it up especially as I will have to download all the software for it before I can start using it - I think I will use the default 'RAID5' setting, that way each disk has a partition set aside for recovery purposes - if any one of the four disks fail, the other disks will have sufficient back-up to be able to repopulate a new disk with all the lost data - neat huh?

I paid £65 (free postage) for the NAS by taking the 'buy-it-now' option on an auction that would have otherwise started at £45 - the trouble is once the bidding starts, I figured it would go for more than £65 anyway, so bit the bullet and shelled out some of my hard-earned PayPal fund... Having done a few cassette to CD conversions recently and had income from some other online sources, I think this will be going down as one of my many 'business expenses' in this tax year.

I will be sure to post an update once I have been able to get the thing up and running and give it a bit of a road-test. I am hoping I will discover some great features to make use of once I start to explore what it can do...