Data Storage for the Home

My search for a good persnal data storage solution prompted me to write this article. I already have neumerous external and internal storage solutions.. right from the now humble USB 2.0 devices, older IDE's to the newer SATA II-10K rpm-10Mb cache-3GB with PCI-X RAID cards!

As a power user, I'm looking for the below features in my storage solution..

Must have:
-Reasonable data transfer rates, to support streaming music/video; around 20MBps
-Solution should not use proprietary standards, software, drivers or access methods
-Price around 200$ US
-Portability

Good to have:
-Wireless (WiFi) access or atleast Ethernet/LAN access

-USB 2.0, FireWire, eSATA (the more the better)
-High data transfer rates

-Good backup software
-500Gb plus capacity (1TB ;)
-Shared storage (multi use capable)
-Capacity expandability (vis SATA or USB ports)
-RAID

Options:
-DAS (Direct attached storage) via USB 2.0, Firewire 400/800, eSATA
-NAS (Network attached storage) 100Mbps or 1Gbps Ethernet, 802.11 a/b/g WiFi
-Home grown NAS using DAS components
-Open Source Software effort (Linux variants, Ubuntu, FreeNAS)

Solution:

Finally, I found a great deal and settled for the Buffalo LinkStation Pro. The LS-500GL features satisfy most of my criterias, and more.. It has 2 USB expansion ports which can be used for printing (print server option), backups to USB, or storage expandablity (to the existing 500Gb SATA II 7400rpm) by USB add on drives. Its got a Giga bit ethernet port, which goes on into my Thomson Wifi router. It's even DLNA certified to support playback on supported medial players (my Dell Laptop is supported). The best part is, that its got an embeded or stripped down Linux (Debian) on it running on a 400Mhz Marvel ARM CPU.

Having Linux on this means the possiblities are endless. I'm now able to hack 'open' the Buffalo 500, and use it as a full fledged NAS box. This can be easily done by the detailed and well written documents found at http://buffalo.nas-central.org/. But, to do this, one needs to have some form of knowledge of the Linux workings and understanding of its command line or shell.

I have now hacked my Buffalo 500 to run a torrent client for me, besides the other usefull Linux services. I now hardly use the vendor provided access framework.

The only major down side to this product is the lower than average transfer speeds. The max I could get even with a cross over ethernet cable was 8MBps. Strangely I get much higher speeds when there are two more more data copy/access streams.

To conclude, I recomend this product for novice to advanced, home or SOHO use with a rating of 9/10.