Last Updated on December 3, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
One of our clients had an old, wheezy Windows 2000 machine that was basically acting as a file server on a peer to peer network.
If we were to replace the machine with a new machine, I would want Raid on it. The problem is that by the time you start putting together a machine like that, you will quickly find yourself into the $2000 plus range. In addition, the costs for the setup will start to add up.
We found a Buffalo Terastation Network Addressable Storage Device. It is one tereabyte of storage that is split among 4 drives in a RAID 5 configuration. That means that if any one of the drives fails, your data will remain intact and you can swap out a replacement drive.
The beautiful part is that the Terastation retails for somewhere around $600 and requires a lot less effort to set up and configure compared to a full blown workstation with RAID. The software to set up the Terastation on the network was easy to use. We had to change from the default 192.168.1 scheme to the 10.1.10 scheme that Comcast uses. That was easy to do.
If you want reliability, you might want to consider purchasing a drive as a cold spare so you can instantly swap out a failed drive.
You can attach USB drives for backup purposes and you can also set up another Terastation for backup purposes.
In summary, we are thinking about using a Terastation solution instead of replacing our elderly XP machine with a workstation with RAID.