In the 'Baseline' blog, I lay out the configuration of my home computer. So you can reference that for more details. To be brief, the storage (hard drives) in my home computer were redundant (RAID1), 250GB capacity usable. I had about 100GB in use.
I needed to set up some kind of solution that I could access that data from my home network, or better yet, the internets.
I'll start by talking about my NetGear n900 home router. It has a USB port on it so that I can plug an external hard drive in there. I have an external Antec USB SATA drive enclosure, with an old 120GB drive in there. I plugged that into the USB port on the n900 and accessed the router. I changed some settings - the UI is pretty easy to use - and I was off and running. Not only was I able to access the drive via my old computer by mapping a drive, but I was also able to access the data from the internets via FTP. The router acts as an FTP server. NICE!
I took the 100GB that I needed and transferred it from my computer to the Antec. I now needed a way to access that data from my iPad or iPhone. I did some research and found that an app called iFTP. for 99 cents, I downloaded it to try it out. It worked like a charm. It did exactly what I needed it to do! I was able to take a file from my email, open it in iFTP, and upload it to the site. I was also able to download a file from the the site and put it on my local device. I now had a way to backup my photos!
The one thing that I did not have at this point was redundancy. The drive attached to my router was just a single drive. Ideally, I would like to find a chassis that would house my two 250GB drives that came out of my home computer in a RAID1 configuration. The problem I encountered is that those drives are PATA. All the external enclosures that support RAID1 were SATA. Looks like I was going to need to take the plunge and buy a SATA enclosure and some drives. The reviews lead me to NewEgg where I found a Vantec chassis that supported RAID1 and up to 2TB drives. I grabbed some OLD 80 GB drives that were laying around for a proof of concept. It turns out I needed to format both drives first, individually, via the Antec enclosure. Then install the two 80GB drives into the chassis. Then reset the chassis and at that point, it was RAID1. I plugged it into the router, and was able to access it from my iPad, iPhone and home computer. I put a movie out there from my home computer - encoded for my apple TV. I downloaded it to my iPad. This is the interesting part! The Video app on the iPad could not find the movie. So I did the only thing that I could and save it to my photo library. i went to my photo library and there was the movie! The iPad thinks it was a movie that I took with the camera on the iPad. I was able to play it back just as if I took the vid with my iPad or iPhone.
I learned how to bring a movie from the FTP server to my iPad or iPhone, and the proof of concept for the Vantec chassis was successful. On to ordering the hard drives!
Might as well go big right? I found a good price on Seagate barracuda 2TB drives via TigerDirect. I didn't need killer performance from these drives. The USB 2.0 interface was going to be the bottleneck anyway. That saved me some money. A few days later, they arrived. I formatted each one individually - by the way - this formatting was an overnight process. 2TB is a LOT of space. Once the drives were ready I installed them in the chassis, plugged the chassis into the router and turned it on. I quick trip through the router's configuration (called ReadyShare by the way) and the chassis was ready to be used. I dumped my 100GB of data onto the chassis and there it was! My redundant solution, available on my home network, and the internet. I spent the next few days cleaning things up via iFTP from my iPhone and iPad.
This next piece of info isn't really important, but I thought it would be nice to include it. I had a VERY old Maxtor external USB drive that had bricked (Read: no worky no more). Because of it's age, I thought it MUST be PATA and not SATA. I cracked open the enclosure. I did it surgically, but it was still pretty destructive. The drive was enclosed in a metal cage that I convinced to open. Sure enough, I was able to remove the drive and it was PATA!!! I filed the bricked drive into my pile of eWaste. Then I grabbed one of the two 250GB PATA drives that came out of my old computer and plugged that in. Plugged in the power cord, and USB to my father's laptop to test it and sure enough, I was able to get to all of my data on that drive. You know, just in case. So now I have two 250 PATA HDDs, a PATA external USB interface, a SATA encosure via the Antec, and my Vantec chassis plugged into my router with 1863 GB available.
Storage solution: Complete.
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