We are looking to purchase a fileserver to put all our Myriad files on to serve our computer network including our three Myriad terminals. Currently, they are on a data partition of our studio 1 hard drive (before you all scream that this is not the best way to set up a network - I know, but there is a good reason that it was done like this that involves three months of tearing my hair out over what was found out to be an unstable power supply affecting our network and causing the Q-NXT db to corrupt).

We have a budget of £500 which was to buy a good pc to use as a server with a 250gb or larger hard drive. I have seen an alternative though - they are effectively stand alone hard drives that are in a case that can be plugges into a network hub and have a USB port and advertise themselves as specifically being for sharing files across a network.

Effectively, they are the server without the computer itself.

My question is whether this sort of unit, which is obviously cheaper than a computer is suitable or whether it is false economy.

An example of such a unit is at http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000AL5H7A/ref=amb_asin-coop-1_39651909/026-2497858-6340435

Anyone else use anything other than a full computer as their fileserver?

Neil Ogden
Hospital Radio Basingstoke

Hi Neil,

Network attached Storage is very much a two headed beast. On the one hand they are very easy to deploy and use, plus you can bung on another when you run out of space.

On the flip side, they can be a bit slow to get going when you request a file. Once the file has started transferring it's fine, but the initial seek can on some devices be a bit slow. This manifests itself as when you fire a cart it takes a bit longer than usual to actually get going, but then plays fine throughout

I think a lot of it depends on the device itself (and probably the budget involved) as we have had reports of engineers who swear by them, and others who swear at them.

For instance at the top end (i.e. several thousand pounds) you can by Fiber connected Storage Area Networks which (although I'm simplifying) are just very big hard drives attached to damn fast controllers in turn connected to very fast networks. These work so well that people like Emap are now considering using them to run their entire corporate networks.

At the bottom end, you end up with a standard harddrive in a box on a (relatively) cheap hard drive controller and therefore isn't a particularly great prospect.

Discuss

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Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness