The best tip you'll get today
DO NOT BUY AN ALL-IN-ONE THING

Buy a hard drive enclosure
Buy a hard drive
Buy another hard drive

The one thing that absolutely will happen, is that it WILL FAIL. Maybe the day after you buy it.

Separate hdd from enclosure, there are warranty issues. If your enclosure fails/power supply fails (I had 3 failures last year) and you open it up, you potentially invalidate the warranty of the hard disk.

Oh and some of the all-in-one things do things to the harddrives. They take perfectly ordinary harddrives, and fuck about with the firmware - often with enclosures that have multiple drives. Dont buy them.

Have one IDE and one SATA enclosure, buy some disks.

For gods sake though, buy 2. On 2 occasions last year I lost 500GB of data - once through a failed disk, and once through me being overindulgent with rsync.

Make of disk - whatever. Make of enclosure, personally, Icybox are utter dogshit. Lacie have been great. Dont buy the cheapest.

Dont buy a cheap NAS either. I mean anything under about £200. It will be shit and you will want to kill entire populations.
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Thu 22 Jan 2009, 12:16, Reply)