- Dec 23, 2002
- 474
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Howdy, fellas!
I was wondering if anyone has any advice for me. I am planning out a small storage/backup system for the small business that I work for, and thought the good people here at this forum may have been down this road before.
My company designs small medical devices, and we do all of our own marketing stuff, so we have not only small files to keep track of (word documents, and other little MS Office stuff), medium-sized files (circuit board layouts, Solidworks models, etc) and a few of the extra-large variety (13 Gb video files from video tapes). There are usually 5 - 7 PCs running most of the time, and about 4 employees accessing and sharing files on a boring, old Windows network (mostly Windows XP with a couple of Vista machines from time to time just to give me a headache).
Right now, I have a PC with a big 500 Gb drive that I've been using as a place for everyone to back their stuff up on in case of a virus infestation, coffee spill, epic hardware fail, etc. But the obvious Achilles heel is that the backup machine itself is susceptible, too.
My instinct is to build us a file-server-type machine here at the office with a RAID array and a tape backup in it to spit data out to be taken off-site. That way, everyone can keep dumping their backups onto the backup machine like normal, and if one drive fails, we won't lose anything. If anyone has a better idea, let me know. I'm not just looking for hardware, I'm also looking for a method to keep all of our data safe from disaster. Security is not a huge issue, nobody would want to deal with this crap anyway, and we don't have much as far as competing companies.
Another thing that I wanted to check on was if you guys think that it is worth it to upgrade to a gigabit LAN. It wouldn't make much sense to open that can of worms unless the sustained transfer rate of a hard drive is more than an old-fashioned 10/100 can handle.
Cost is my biggest issue. I was hoping to get it all done for around $1,000 (give or take). It's possible that Dell, or another company makes a system that would do me some good, so I'm open to those possibilities, too. For heavyweight hardware like this, I'm usually able to build a system for a lot cheaper than Dell can.
What do you think? Any ideas?
Thanks for humoring me!
:beer:
I was wondering if anyone has any advice for me. I am planning out a small storage/backup system for the small business that I work for, and thought the good people here at this forum may have been down this road before.
My company designs small medical devices, and we do all of our own marketing stuff, so we have not only small files to keep track of (word documents, and other little MS Office stuff), medium-sized files (circuit board layouts, Solidworks models, etc) and a few of the extra-large variety (13 Gb video files from video tapes). There are usually 5 - 7 PCs running most of the time, and about 4 employees accessing and sharing files on a boring, old Windows network (mostly Windows XP with a couple of Vista machines from time to time just to give me a headache).
Right now, I have a PC with a big 500 Gb drive that I've been using as a place for everyone to back their stuff up on in case of a virus infestation, coffee spill, epic hardware fail, etc. But the obvious Achilles heel is that the backup machine itself is susceptible, too.
My instinct is to build us a file-server-type machine here at the office with a RAID array and a tape backup in it to spit data out to be taken off-site. That way, everyone can keep dumping their backups onto the backup machine like normal, and if one drive fails, we won't lose anything. If anyone has a better idea, let me know. I'm not just looking for hardware, I'm also looking for a method to keep all of our data safe from disaster. Security is not a huge issue, nobody would want to deal with this crap anyway, and we don't have much as far as competing companies.
Another thing that I wanted to check on was if you guys think that it is worth it to upgrade to a gigabit LAN. It wouldn't make much sense to open that can of worms unless the sustained transfer rate of a hard drive is more than an old-fashioned 10/100 can handle.
Cost is my biggest issue. I was hoping to get it all done for around $1,000 (give or take). It's possible that Dell, or another company makes a system that would do me some good, so I'm open to those possibilities, too. For heavyweight hardware like this, I'm usually able to build a system for a lot cheaper than Dell can.
What do you think? Any ideas?
Thanks for humoring me!
:beer: