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