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Ever since I took down the Windows Home Server and converted it as a Linux file server, I have been having some trouble connecting my wife’s Windows 7 laptop to the Samba file shares.  And recently her hard drive is getting full and we need a quick way to backup her work.  So I decided to pick up a Western Digital My Book Essential while it was on sale. Continue reading

Been meaning to sort out the storage on my iMac for a while now. My iMac comes with only a 320GB hard drive. At first I thought that was plenty of room. But with a camera that takes photos at 15M pixels, and a whole bunch of podcast videos I have been downloading from iTunes, I was running low with hard drive space on my iMac. I tried to keep files on the Windows Home Server but even with a GBit network, the added latency does not feel as good as accessing files on the local hard drive. Hence some new hardware is justified :)

The iMac has 1 x FireWire 800, 1 x FireWire 400, and 3 x USB 2.0 connections. Obviously speed is important here and FireWire 800 is the default choice. Been looking around on the market for something that also provides some fault tolerance. Was considering Drobo ($350 just for the box and no hard drives) but cannot really come up with the money for it. So finally settled with a somewhat cheaper solution: a WD My Book Studio Edition II with 2 TB storage ($280).

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Since I acquired the Acer easyStore Home Server, I have been trying to reorganize my digital library within the server.  As the Acer easyStore Home Server came with 2TB of drive space, I quickly added a couple more 1TB drives I used to have with the old homemade Home Server to it to make it a total of 4TB in storage.  After migrating all the files back to it, I was left with only about 0.8TB of free space.  I was faced with a new decision, either deleting old files or add additional storage to the server. Continue reading