Do It Yourself NAS

Tom’s Hardware goes into Ontrack and reports on the world of data recover. Lots of good information on data recovery and costs. Recovering data from “RAID systems can reach the five-digit zone rather quickly”, so it’s definitely worth investing in a good backup mechanism before disaster occurs.

Hard drive failure is especially disastrous for smaller companies working with a single server and a single disk, if they do not have a complete and working data backup at hand. The whole situation is even more complicated if the broken hard drive is a member of a RAID array. Neither hard drive failure in RAID 1 nor RAID 5 will result in data loss, since this scenario has been taken care of by the choice of these RAID levels in advance. But the risk of human error increases: self-made data loss occurs if you accidentally substitute the wrong drive in a degraded RAID 5 array (one with a failed hard drive).

Engadget is reporting that Western Digital has added NAS to some of their My Book external USB/Firewire drives.

Welcome to Do It Yourself – Network Attached Storage! DIY NAS will hold news, content, reviews and help for those rolling their own network attached storage devices. Whether it is a Linux box holding dozens of hard drives, a Mac Mini stacked on a mountain of firewire devices, or a Linksys NSLU2 with a USB drive, DIY NAS will eventually have some kind of information about it.