New Raid Box
So, in the continuing saga that is music at YPS Manor, I have a new piece of hardware. Let me take a moment to explain the backstory.
In the beginning was a WD NetCenter 320 GB network hard drive. I determined that 320 gigs was not going to be sufficient over the long haul. The WD now hides in the server closet and handles mundane things like recipe backups and archived downloads.
In attempt to get in front of the storage problem, I requested and received a Fantom G-Force NAS. As a proper child of the era, I grew up watching Battle of The Planets, so the opportunity to own a G-Force was fairly irresistible.
I should have resisted. A few weeks after I bought it, the fan went out. Not getting any response from tech support, I kludged up a new fan. Then the power supply went out. Twice. Then a hard drive failed. In short, it hasn't been the most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned.
Well, right about the time the hard drive failed, I got an Amazon gift card. It nearly covered the purchase price of a ZyXEL NSA221
enclosure. I still had very little data on either of my last hard drive purchases. So, after a bit of drive swapping between machines, I have a 1.5 TB RAID-1 stack.
One of the main reasons I purchased the Zyxel is because of the native support for Squeezecenter. I wouldn't have to spend my limited free time kludging together a solution. Ultimately, that was a failure for one simple reason: the Zyxel is slow. I expect slightly snappier response from my media server than I was getting. So on that front, it was a disappointment. I'm still using my little Zotac board with AMD Sempron for the media server, and keeping a backup of all the music on the Zyxel.
Other than that, the Zyxel has been fine. I had to RMA the first one for a bad power switch, but it's been flawless since then. It's a little slow on huge data dumps, like the initial copying of the music files. Setup was easy and painless, everything in the house recognizes it, it holds a ton of data. Woo and hoo. If you already have drives, or even if you don't, it's hard to go wrong with the Zyxel. A little work on your part gets a lot more storage space for the buck.
In the beginning was a WD NetCenter 320 GB network hard drive. I determined that 320 gigs was not going to be sufficient over the long haul. The WD now hides in the server closet and handles mundane things like recipe backups and archived downloads.
In attempt to get in front of the storage problem, I requested and received a Fantom G-Force NAS. As a proper child of the era, I grew up watching Battle of The Planets, so the opportunity to own a G-Force was fairly irresistible.
I should have resisted. A few weeks after I bought it, the fan went out. Not getting any response from tech support, I kludged up a new fan. Then the power supply went out. Twice. Then a hard drive failed. In short, it hasn't been the most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned.
Well, right about the time the hard drive failed, I got an Amazon gift card. It nearly covered the purchase price of a ZyXEL NSA221
enclosure. I still had very little data on either of my last hard drive purchases. So, after a bit of drive swapping between machines, I have a 1.5 TB RAID-1 stack.One of the main reasons I purchased the Zyxel is because of the native support for Squeezecenter. I wouldn't have to spend my limited free time kludging together a solution. Ultimately, that was a failure for one simple reason: the Zyxel is slow. I expect slightly snappier response from my media server than I was getting. So on that front, it was a disappointment. I'm still using my little Zotac board with AMD Sempron for the media server, and keeping a backup of all the music on the Zyxel.
Other than that, the Zyxel has been fine. I had to RMA the first one for a bad power switch, but it's been flawless since then. It's a little slow on huge data dumps, like the initial copying of the music files. Setup was easy and painless, everything in the house recognizes it, it holds a ton of data. Woo and hoo. If you already have drives, or even if you don't, it's hard to go wrong with the Zyxel. A little work on your part gets a lot more storage space for the buck.
posted by T at 1:44 PM
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