This should be cheaper…

I want to have a 2TB NAS at home with room to grow. The closest things I have found are like this LaCie drive, which still retails for almost a grand. It’s one of the better ones out there. The Apple solution doesn’t seem to exist anymore and it was far too expensive anyway. Looks like Apple has someone else building them now.

I keep thinking, “This should be cheaper!” but yet I cannot find anything cheaper. 500gb drives can be found for under $80/each, so that should run just over $300. Some sort of case/power supply which can’t cost too much. I can find PC cases for $20 witha  $20 power supply. Then I just basically need a really simple SATA to Gigabit interface/controller. Really, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. I’m sure some intel or similar embedded processor with 64mb of ram could do the trick. Not expensive. Makers of hardware (Dell, Apple, etc) build this stuff for far cheaper than I can from NewEgg or whatever, but yet they don’t!

I’m not sure if it’s because most people don’t yet “need” large amount of hard drive space and they still see multiple terrabyte solutions as “business only” which means they screw you on price? I personally want to get into HD video, ripping every video I get from Netflix (about 6 a week), etc… lots of space.

I think sadly my only/best solution is to go and build a super-barebones PC, throw two gigabit ethernet cards in it, and get 4 or more drives to put in there? I can build it then for around $400. For the grand that other companies want I could probably build a 4TB solution with Raid 5.

Now the problem is… how the hell do I back something like that up frequently? Certainly not burning DVDs. No consumer tape solution exists in that range, and I don’t like the idea of just using more hard drives.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 11:10 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.