High Rise Drives
by Gary Woods

We're all using hard drive space like crazy lately. Whether it's all those digital pictures you've taking, the MP3s you've been downloading or the digital video you've been storing for your debut on YouTube.com you're chewing up some serious space.

To help you store all of that stuff I found a hard drive enclosure by Iomega called the Storcenter Pro NAS 150D. This device has 4 drive bays and comes in two configurations. You can get either 1 Terabyte for $799 or 2 Terabytes for $1,349. The 1 Terabyte configurations has 4 250 GB drives and the 2 Terabyte versions have 4 500 GB drives.

These devices are what are called NAS or Network Attached Storage and they're basically a stripped-down service which includes a 400-MHz CPU, 128 MB of RAM a Gigabit Ethernet connection and four USB ports.

You can configure the drives for RAID 0 which gives you the fastest response by spreading your data across more than 1 drive. RAID 1 giving you mirrored data which means if one drive goes down you've got a complete backup on a separate drive. Or RAID 5 which combines the two methods giving you the advantage of speed and the comfort of knowing your data is backed up. You can even set the system up in what's called JBOD or Just a Bunch of Disks. This would give you the maximum of storage.

If you're looking for more storage check out the Iomega Storcenter Pro NAS 150d.

If you have any suggestions or questions for me please drop me a note at garyandlaury@santabarbaraproperties.com or see my column on the Internet at http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com or call me at (805) 729-0910