The sad part about building a home file server is that there's nowhere you can just dump 800Gb of data for a week :\
Hi CRC,
The word NAS springs to mind. I have a Dlink-323 at home with 2 x 1TB Samsung drives in a mirrored array. I use it purely for backup & piece of mind. It may not be the quickest but for the price it does the job.[/QUOTE]
Yeah - I know of these, but as an unemployed student, I just don't have the funds to aquire one... 1Tb HDD's are ~$205AUD - and it's be awesome to have 3 of those in a RAID5 array giving 2Tb of storage with redundancy - but I haven't had that kind of cash since I started learning how to fly
The system that is hosting the HDDs is online 24/7 anyhow as it hosts my email and all that stuff - as well as being the primary point for the initial backup of all my gear before it goes to tape. Thankfully, as I used to work in IT, a lot of gear that I have is almost commercial quality with regards to reliability - so I haven't had ANY data loss in 4-5 years...
There are still areas I could improve in however... I just need some funds to do that... ie the boot drive for that system is an even older 120Gb drive - which holds the entire OS
as you can't buy 120Gb drives anymore, I'd have to replace that with 2 x drives of the same capacity to make that redundent - and it kinda scares me when I think about it too much - as the 120Gb drive that runs everything is older than the 300Gb drive that just crashed!