File Storage solution
 

As you can see, I'm fast running out of space. I'm looking to upgrade my capacity in the most effective way possible, and I'm wondering what I can do with this setup and an extra £100-150. I want some sort of backup* option, as obviously I'd hate to lose all that data to some hard disk fault or other fkup. I realise a RAID5 setup is out of my price range, but are there any other ways to increase capacity and provide some sort of stable backup* in that price range?

*say CD-Rs and you're fired

I don't think there's any kind of hardware RAID that would be usable on that setup, you'd need too many extra drives for the budget and RAID 1 would be messy to set up given you've already got three drives full of data...

In that money you can get two 80gig, fast drives at £160 for the pair, but it won't afford you any data security, it'll just give you an extra 160gig of space =/

Crappy as it sounds, CD-R seems the best solution if you want both extra space and backup.

So I'm fired then.

Actually, both the 80g drives I have there are the one on that link. One was from OCUK, the 2nd from dabs.co.uk which is about £10 cheaper.

Seeing as your image link doesn't work I can't see exactly what you're wanting to back up, but there are 3 plausible options that don't involve CDR.

(1) Imaging:
If you want to back up whole drives, you can allways image them to another drive or drives. Most imaging programs (such as Norton Ghost) offer image compression which may or may not prove to be much of a saving depending on what you're backing up. For example, if you're backing up lots of text based stuff (website source, essays, financial info like spreadsheets and databases) you can expect a good compression result. MP3s or DivXs will not be compressed much if at all.

(2) Network storage:
If you have another computer available to you on the network then you could back stuff up to drives on it.

(3) A combination of 1 and 2.

There is no cheap way to back up large ammounts of data, so whatever you do it's going to cost you.

:)

*fixed link*

Network storage isnt really an option, since I have more capacity on one 80gb disk than the rest of the network put together (home lan comprised of a few machines with under 20gb each).

I was wondering how effective compression would be, and how much I could maybe store with an ~80gb dedicated to backup. I've only ever seen 2:1 ratios when talking about hard disk compression, I was wondering if more was (easily) possible.

Not on things like movies and mp3s as it seems you've got on those drives, you're looking at 1% compression at absolute best on mp3s and maybe 5%-10% on certain types of mpegs.

Well I'm considering getting another pair of 80GB WD Caviar disks (and sticking them in my debian box to save strain on my psu:). So far I've seen £160 for the pair at OCUK, £150 at Dabs (both 8mb cache) and £130 for 2x80gig with only 2mb cache.

How much performance does the extra 6mb give, and is it worth £20?

Depends on the file access type.

http://www17.tomshardware.com/storag...wd1200-04.html


It 'feels' faster than my old drive, anyway.