Wireless Hard Drive advice please...

StuntMonkey

StuntMonkey

Messages
561
Name
Alex Burge
Edit My Images
Yes
Hi guys and gals.

not sure if this is the right forum, mods please move if not.

Im after yet more advice please :LOL:

Both my fiancee and i are photographers and have a huge amount of data we need to save and backup. we mainly use our laptops for day to day stuff, we have a main PC with a wireless router as well as a G3 Mac. Carly is also looking to get a new Macbook in the near future(no doubt questions to come in the near future regarding that!).
We have various externall hard drives but would like a some central wireless storage. I must admit i am a complete technophobe and dont know what i need. what i would like(if such a thing exists) is a completely independent wireless hard drive that i can just plug in to the mains and off we go...
i was wondering if anyone has any advice/experiance of such a thing or has any suggestions of what i do need or what to buy? ideally we are looking for a Terabite of storage.
also im only looking to spend £150(that way i can get a new 32" LCD TV too!:D).

any way, over to you guys... as always, any help and info is much appreciated(y)
 
I assume that your router also has wired Ethernet port(s)? If so, look for a NAS (Network Attached Storage) external drive. They connect to your router using a standard Cat5 cable and appear on the network like a shared/exported drive (not sure of the Mac terminology).

Edit: Here you go - http://www.ebuyer.com/search?sort=pricelow&q=NAS&limit=10&page=1
 
StuntMonkey said:
parish said:
I assume that your router also has wired Ethernet port(s)?
:shrug: im a complete dumbass, what am i looking for? :thinking:
Click to expand...

Can your wireless (broadband) router be connected wired as well (not USB)? It almost certainly will as you usually need to use a wired network connection to set the wireless up.

Look on the back for a squarish socket labelled something like 'LAN' '10/100' 'Ethernet' etc.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
IanC_UK said:
Would agree with parish, however one caveat, get a NAS with raid capability, or bunching all of your images on one hard drive to have it then fail and lose everything would not be much fun !
Click to expand...

Very good point - but I doubt he'd get that for £150 (he's looking for 1TB of storage).
 
im guessing RAID is a wired connection if needed to get the data off?

the £150 budget isnt cast in stone... just going to be the difference between a nice new TV or a little more on Mr Mastercard :LOL:
 
StuntMonkey said:
im guessing RAID is a wired connection if needed to get the data off?

the £150 budget isnt cast in stone... just going to be the difference between a nice new TV or a little more on Mr Mastercard :LOL:
Click to expand...

RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Basically, it spreads your data over multiple (minimum of 2) disks, in such a way that if one disk dies all the data can be recovered.

It uses various methods to do this, but it's all transparent to you. For example, the external box may contain two 500GB drives but you (or rather your computer) just sees it as one 500GB drive. If one of the drives dies, put in a brand new one, and voila all you data will reappear.

It's like a continuous, real-time backup system, which means that you don't have to do your own back ups.

Edit You can get hardware of software RAID. An external unit will be the former. It won't/shouldn't require any setting up (although there are probably settings that you can change, but the defaults will be OK), just connect it up and off you go
 
I guess RAID would depend if you are backing up all of the data, but for me i wouldnt settle for anything less, and yes it will cost a lot more than 150 quid, looking at closer to 500 i would think for a decent system with disks.

Do not buy a Western Digital Mybook World of any type, i have one and its slow as hell, advertised as a gigabit wired connection, yeah right if its gb im a multi millionaire ;) !

If you dont go the raid route, you would be better buying 2 external drives and making sure you copy one on to the other at very regualr intervals, to make sure you have a backup, as doing this to DVD will be both time consuming and boring after a while ;)
 
parish said:
RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Basically, it spreads your data over multiple (minimum of 2) disks, in such a way that if one disk dies all the data can be recovered.

It uses various methods to do this, but it's all transparent to you. For example, the external box may contain two 500GB drives but you (or rather your computer) just sees it as one 500GB drive. If one of the drives dies, put in a brand new one, and voila all you data will reappear.

It's like a continuous, real-time backup system, which means that you don't have to do your own back ups.

Edit You can get hardware of software RAID. An external unit will be the former. It won't/shouldn't require any setting up (although there are probably settings that you can change, but the defaults will be OK), just connect it up and off you go
Click to expand...


Ah right, thank you (y) definately sounds like something thats worth the extra money!

so, what do you guys use or have experience of? any hard drives you can recommend?
 
IanC_UK said:
Do not buy a Western Digital Mybook World of any type, i have one and its slow as hell, advertised as a gigabit wired connection, yeah right if its gb im a multi millionaire ;) !
Click to expand...

I was reading something about the increasing availability of Gigabit Ethernet and it seems that a lot of supposedly gb devices merely support the protocol but with 10/100 hardware so you'll only get 100Mbps speeds. The clue is in the price apparently.
 
IanC_UK said:
Do not buy a Western Digital Mybook World of any type, i have one and its slow as hell, advertised as a gigabit wired connection, yeah right if its gb im a multi millionaire ;) !
QUOTE]


thats the one i was ust looking at! :LOL:
is it a case thats its just slow or rubbish?
Click to expand...
 
StuntMonkey said:
IanC_UK said:
Do not buy a Western Digital Mybook World of any type, i have one and its slow as hell, advertised as a gigabit wired connection, yeah right if its gb im a multi millionaire ;) !
Click to expand...


thats the one i was ust looking at! :LOL:
is it a case thats its just slow or rubbish?
Click to expand...

Its a bit pants if you use Macs, keeps disappearing off the network, and has to be rebooted, its also painfully slow !
 
StuntMonkey said:
thats the one i was ust looking at! :LOL:
is it a case thats its just slow or rubbish?
Click to expand...

I think he means that it can't achieve gigabit speeds, which will only be a problem if you have a gigabit network, which you don't as you're using wireless.

Ian, can you confirm that? Is it OK on a 100Mbps LAN (I've been looking at these too)?
 
It will work on 100mb LAN but was going to take 36 hours to copy my photos onto it, i upgraded my network to gb and it cut this down to about 18 hours, whereas i can copy pc to pc the same data in less than 2 hours !
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top