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Holy god. At least now I have an answer when people tell me I've gone overkill...

I'm thinking of the xServe G5 w/3x400GB drives and the RAID card. Should give me 0.8 TB of actual storage configured as RAID 5 for about $5K. Of course, I can only lose one drive without losing data, but I think the LaCie drives will be OK as standalone backups (as long as I never turn them on and never need them). Should be good enough for pics and 1500 or so CDs. I needed something in the way of a standalone network device, however, so don't think the xRAID works for me. I think--tell me if I'm wrong--that won't work as a standalone network device.

Turns out the cluster thing is irrelevant, I really just need the xServe. Anything else fun I can do with this puppy once its hooked up?

Having had the RAID for over a month I just can't imagine doing without it, so it really is not overkill - just expensive!

I can't help but think that an xServe G5 might be overkill for you if all you are looking for is a NAS solution. (It is a different story if you are also looking for a server.)

I know that LaCie just increased their Ethernet Drive capacity to 1Terrabyte for $1,599.

You could buy two (or even three) of them for less than the xServe. You could then use one for backup. You could stash them in a remote location - wherever you have ethernet.

They seem to have gotten good reviews. The biggest negative for me would be the fact that they are only 10/100 ethernet.

I am a huge fan of Apple products. So if you are looking for a server, the xServe would be a fantastic way to go. If you are only looking for storage, it might make more sense to find a different solution.

At this stage, I've had three drive crashes in less than two years--one internal Western Digital, one Maxstor external, and one LaCie external. Add in CRC read errors and 2% of the data being unrecoverable on a fourth Lacie drive, and it makes me think I'm taxing the limits of normal consumer technology. While I agree that the xServe offers excessive processing power for a dedicated NAS, its the cheapest RAID 5 storage unit that is intended for a 24x7 commercial environment...

I thought about the fact that I could get five of the buffalo terastations for the same $ as the xServe. But, it's still leaving me feeling kinda exposed. Maybe I'll change my mind tomorrow (today was the day that 300 CDs painstakingly ripped into WAV format disappeared)...

What else do you use your server to do? I had previously ordered a miniMac that I was going to attach to the main stereo/video rig to run iTunes and get WAVs off the xServe. I've also got an elgato eyeTV 500 on order and will see about recording some off-air HD onto the server. But, the server is still acting like NAS...

I know the feeling of just wanting your data to be safe. I really don't want to have to re-rip all those CDs, let alone the impossibility of retaking ten thousand photos!

I have my RAID set up as a local disk on my G5. In other words, I don't have a server at all. The RAID volumes just show up on my desktop as local drives. They never have to spin up, they are just always there.

One interesting note about RAID. A RAID is actually less RELIABLE than a normal disk.

If you take 14 hard drives (ignore the controller for now), each with a Mean Time Between Failure of 500,000 hours each and tie them all together. You get a system with a MTBF of only 35,714 hours! A decrease in reliability of 93%. What makes RAID 5 (with distributed parity information) so great is that it is FAULT TOLERANT.

In theory anyway, my RAID can have 4 drives, one controller, one power supply, one cooling fan, and one UPS all fail all at the same time without losing data. I have a far greater chance of having some failure than just a single disk drive with a MTBF of 500,000 hours. The difference is that when I have a failure, it is likely that it won't be catastrophic.

I don't mind replacing the drives, so I'm more worried about mean time between catastrophic failures. Which, right now, seems to be about 6 mo. for me.

I've poked around some more, and may end up with a Dell PowerVault 775N. It's enterprise grade, but maxes out at 4 x 250 GB drives; with RAID 5, that gets me only 0.75 TB, but that should hold me a while. Would be nice to have the hot standby, but I think my solution may be to get a spare drive and have it available...

I did look at the Lacie NAS, as well as others by Snap and Weibe...