I have need of more storage space, I currently have two portable hard drives which contain a mix of movies, music, photos, etc and are filling up fast. They’re small (500G in total) also a few years old now at this stage. I’m not worried about data loss if they fail (anything important is backed up in multiple places, including the cloud) but it would be an inconvenience if one were to die.
So I’m looking for something:
1) big’ish (capable of storing a few years of data)
2) networked access (so we can access content from any machine in the house)
3) somewhat reliable
4) cheap 
There’s a bewildering amount of choice when it comes to Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices for home use when you start looking into it. There’s the high end of the personal market there’s the likes of ReadyNAS and Drabo, both of which sound fab and have really good reputations (and have great expansion options), but are a bit outside of my budget. At the other end of the scale there’s the option of building your own, and I think long term it would be a great pet project to build a ZFS system (something similar to what Søren Ragsdale has built).
For now however, I’m going to go cheap and cheerful with a 1TB Western Digital MyBook, reasonably good reputation and very good value at €190 from Misco.ie. Will see how it works out, should do for a few years and hopefully it won’t be a case of “at that price, they’re sure not to last long” (as the old adds for Quinsworth used to say!
Also, thanks to John & Aman (via twitter) and James & John (via lunch time chats) for guiding me through the selection process!
Tags: hardware