External Hard Drive Doohickey

[Honkytonk]

So I've got 4 external hard drives now, all of which are pretty much full of various things - trying to think of the name of the tower/storage system type jobbie that I can plug them all into and just use the one connection for all 4 of them, but bugger me if I can think of what they're called.

Somebody please tell me so I can feel like a moron.

[Peter Venkman]

Dock, Caddy, Cage, NAS?

[Honkytonk]

Dock, Caddy, Cage, NAS?

THAT'S THEY BUGGER!

Ta Venks.

[Samdy Gray]

Are you going to buy a ready built system or build your own?

I'm in the process of upgrading mine, hence the thread about RAM.

[Honkytonk]

Are you going to buy a ready built system or build your own?

I'm in the process of upgrading mine, hence the thread about RAM.

I haven't decided yet, so still having a browse. Building one shouldn't be particularly complex I'd imagine, as I've built several PC's before. I imagine a self-built would also mean you can upgrade it when necessary (as you're doing) to add more RAM/disk space etc. I essentially just need a bunch of USB 3.0 ports and space for an internal hard drive (or two, might as well leave room to expand)

[Samdy Gray]

My original NAS was an old Via motherboard with an onboard 1.4Ghz processor. It did the job fantastically as a file server with a few hard drives. You could use any old motherboard & CPU combo really.

You'd probably be better off removing your external drives from their caddies and connecting them directly to the NAS. You'd get much better speeds. Or it's an excuse to buy a few brand new 4TB drives to then just copy your data over and use the USB drives for backups.

Whilst the pre-built systems are great, they can somewhat lack in features and you could probably build your own system that will have much more flexibility for the same or less cost.

[Honkytonk]

Or it's an excuse to buy a few brand new 4TB drives to then just copy your data over and use the USB drives for backups.

That's kind of the the route I was thinking of taking - I can dump everything on them and use the externals as portables/unplugged backups for my important stuff. As it is I've got a few old computer HDD's as well as three external hard drives that are not very well organised, but I don't have the spare space atm to re-organise them.

[Samdy Gray]

Just get a motherboard with a decent number of SATA ports and you'll future proof yourself to some extent.

[pauld]

That's kind of the the route I was thinking of taking - I can dump everything on them and use the externals as portables/unplugged backups for my important stuff.

If you've got some spare, worth thinking about taking a snapshot of anything you really want to keep and dumping it off site (office, parents etc). Backing up to a NAS is a great way of protecting against hardware failure, but offsite backups also protect against fire, burglars etc. Of course, you have to then balance how often you update the offsite, inconvenience etc etc and whether it's really worth it. Depends how much the data's worth to you, really

[Simon Pieman]

Google drive is free and provides 15gb of storage in the cloud and can sync live. Useful for documents you can't afford to lose.

[jayohaitchenn]

Dropbox is 50gb and free

[Samdy Gray]

Dropbox is only 50GB if you have activate it from certain brands of phone isn't it?

[Honkytonk]

I already back up to cloud - losing 3/4's of my years work at Uni in second year taught me a harsh lesson RE:offsite backups.

[Simon Pieman]

Dropbox is only 50GB if you have activate it from certain brands of phone isn't it?

Yep for 2 years. Then presumably you have to pay or lose 48gb of space

[jayohaitchenn]

I never read the damn smallprint.