Replacement for Maxtor Shared Storage drives

navvara

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Sep 4, 2007
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Here at work we've been using 3 Maxtor Shared Storage drives for backup and data storage. One year ago we had 1 320 GB Shared Storage I and 2 500 GB Shared Storage II drives.

Both 500 GB drives died and had to be replaced (out of warranty). One of these replacements was dropped and had to be replaced. Two months ago we replaced the 320 GB drive with a 1 TB Shared Storage II drive. It too failed.

In the space of one year I've seen 3 (4) Shared Storage drives fail. Some completely some gave a PFA before failing. With the latest 1 TB drive (still in warranty) Seagate has been very helpfull with getting a replacement.

First their online RMA service doesn't work and second. When I managed to get a live person to put in an RMA for me under their enterprise drive replacement program (since this is drive contains business data we couldn't send in the drive) the operator told me I can destroy the drive and send them the circuit board to get a replacement. That I did (with a big freakin' hammer I might add) and to my surprise they sent me a replacement circuit board..................................... :eek:

At any rate, I've had it with Seagate and I need to find a suitable replacement for the shared storage drives (I'll keep the remaining 500 GB drives until they fail). Right now I was thinking that http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822165060 would be a good replacement. Any thoughts/suggestions?
 

montyuk

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Oct 22, 2008
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heh its probably a bad time to contact seagate at the moment anyway,

have you considered using usb 2.0 drives instead of nas drives?
i have a pair of buffalo 1tb drivestations which im very happy with, give me decent read and write, although for multiple users probably not ideal.

an alternative is to get yourself a fulltower case with a simple spec system inside (with gb ethernet) and give it a bunch of hard drives to share.

will give you higher performance than a standard nas storage.
 

navvara

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I forgot to mention that I need to rotate one of these drives offsite each week. A desktop would be nice but I can't be swapping out drives 52 times a year.
 

montyuk

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ok how about a single tower with its drives and then two external drives one of which is used for a full backup each night whilst the other is away offsite (im assuming for fire safe backup),

so you have internal backups inside the machine (im thinking a raid array of some sort with redundancy), plus the extra external backup, plus the offsite.

so instead of swapping the internals, you simply update tweedledum to the latest backup, send him off to the offsite, and then when tweedledee comes back you update him to the latest backup ready for the following week.

heh im still waiting for someone else to come in with another idea.