Now thats a really nice alternative!

I could use the onboard RAID or sling in a controller card later, I bet theres a fair bit of room inside for drives too.

HP ML115 or ML110 - about £180-£200.

Add 2x drives and an OS and you got a nice file server with mirrored drives for ~ £300.

If you do that, for gods sake get a G5.  I had an ML115 G1 and nothing would work on it.

Quote from: soopahfly

Hows about two of these -
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Buffalo-Live-Linkstation-500GB-NAS-Network-Hard-Drive_W0QQitemZ320498854945QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Computing_HardDrives_RL?hash=item4a9f386c21

Upgrade the HDDs in it, sell the old ones and set one to back up to the other.  Not quite raid, but should be safe enough.

Those are silly cheap, I was just looking at the thread in the bargain forums, two of them would be very useful, hmmm...

Two of those and 2 x replacement 2TB SATA drives comes to £304, thats got to be the cheapest 2TB mirrored NAS solution anywhere, plus, youll have 2 500Gb SATA drives.

Im so tempted myself.

beware of cheap nas boxes....

i had about 5 of them cheap ones off ebay (years ago) and stuck old hard drives in them.... but they were shockingly bad.... i tossed em all away in the end.... i think half a dozen people here did the same thing too

Seems I was a bit too hasty buying a Seagate 2Tb LP drive, Im getting what seems to be infamous click of death on the drive I should have read some reviews! My recommendation is avoid like gonorrhea.

Im going to RMA it and get either a Samsung or Hitachi, probably the Samsung F3EG. Bloody HDDs Spent 10 hours formatting the twatting thing too

I would have gone straight for the Samsung had the Seagate not been a bit cheaper, plus the fact that one of the Spinpoints I have needs an RMA makes it off putting.

Anyway, to keep OT, other recent considerations in the realm of storage Ive been making are:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2313
One of these for the top of my Antec P183 and a four drive RAID 10 setup.

Or a couple of those in something like this:
http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/Cooler+Master+Centurion+590+Black+?productId=32597#moreImages

Running something like FreeNAS or unRAID on an Atom based system perhaps.

For backups and flexible storage have you thought of an external drive caddy.
Something that lets you hot-swap different drives.

Ive got a bunch of old 80GB seagate Satas after replacing them with a pair of 500GB barracudas.

It mean I can dump music, pictures etc on the external drive and just hide them away as archive data.