- Internal Hard Drives
- External Hard Drives
- Network Attached Storage
- DVD/CD Burners
Internal Hard Drives: Hard drives are approaching $0.30 per GigaByte. Do not skimp. The minimum accepted configuration for a new PC should be at least two (internal) hard drives of at least 120GB each. Street price for a 120GB drive is ~$60. Two figures of merit for hard drives are rotation speed and built-in buffer. Currently we do not recommend anything under 7200 RPM and 8 MB. The principal interfaces are:
- EIDE
- SATA (serial ATA)
- SCSI
- SCSI drives are usually used in high-availability servers. They are overkill for SOHO computing.
- SATA is the emerging standard, even replacing SCSI in high-availability servers.
- EIDE the old standby
We recommend SATA with one caveat: your OS might not support it. XP must have SP1 installed, for instance. What we have done, when we did not have XP with SP1/2 already applied, is to bring the OS up on an EIDE drive and then have the other drive(s) SATA.
External Hard Drives:
An external hard drive can be an excellent back-up solution. We recommend USB2.0 and drives of at least 160GB (street price ~$90).
Network Attached Storage (NAS):
A NAS device is basically a special purpose PC/Server with, these days, a gigabit LAN connection and a terabyte or more of hard drives configured as a RAID array. With RAID arrays, one drive can fail without loss of data. Currently there are two NAS devices available for SOHO that we feel that we can recommend:
- Buffalo Technology's TeraStation (in the one TeraByte configuration - street price ~$575 at Amazon or the Pro II for about $100 more)
- INFRANT's Ready NAS 600 (in the one TeraByte configuration - street price ~$999 at Amazon)
- HP MV2020 Media Vault (in the 500 MB configuration - street price ~$359 at Amazon)