which one is the best home storage solution?

brannsiu

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If you forecast your hard drive (3.5) will continue to grow each year (probably 3-4 hard drive a year)
which one do you think is the best home storage solution?

I have been thinking about Either

Plan A
Getting a 3.5 hard drive docking and buy only internal hard drives, whenever a particular drive is needed, plug it into the docking. The unused drive is kept in a 3.5 drive shock protection box and archive it.

Problem: Frequent connections to the SATA port could possibly damage the ports and touching the hard drive directly with hand might also have static problems.

Or

Plan B
Buy only 3.5 external desktop hard drives that comes with case.

Problem: Size

What do you think? Or any third way?

 

brannsiu

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very often - few times a week , as a result I will probably not thinking about SATA docking it will definitely wear the ports
 


You said home, but a few HD every year, to me, crosses into the small business/home business realm, I'd head over http://www.smallnetbuilder.com and ask them instead. Toms is a more modest forum. What you want is a SCALABLE NEAR-LINE STORAGE SOLUTION. Near-Line is an IT term for storage that are not quite on-line all the time, but not off-line either as if you have to manually bring it over, plug it in, wait for it to boot blah-blah.

A typical near-line solution in the olden days are racks of backup tapes with a robot arm. It's very scalable, and the backup software maintains the "library" so to access it you just had to tell the software to retrieve blah-blah and the robot arm go grab the correct tape, mount it and fire up the reader. Now THESE DAYS with dirt cheap HD storage space, am sure there are something better and less expensive, but I have not kept up.