Network hard drive recommendations

[Joe C]

If your in Mich. Let me know and I'll give you an older pc that you can use for a NAS, although you'll have to get your own hard drives.

 

[strollin]

Mine is a cable modem with built in router. Don't think it has USB.

Now would it be beneficial to get a router with wifi and ethernet that has a USB port for a USB drive and plug it into my cable modem via ethernet?

Would there be any benefit to the wifi speed and range in doing that or am I now approaching the cost of a NAS?

Mine is a cable modem as well and it has a USB port. How hard would it be to check if yours has one or not? A quick look to the back of the modem/router is all it would take. What have you got to lose?

 

[Jmcinvale]

I'm in Georgia so that wouldn't work.

Haven't had the time to look.

Will do that in a few.

EDIT:

It has no USB port at all

 

[TechnoChicken]

I have been thinking of building one but I heard you need 8gb of RAM or more...

 

[Jmcinvale]

I had a 2004 windows xp machine with 2 gigs of RAM i used for sharing some folders on the network and it worked fine for that purpose until the two drives in RAID 1 decided to mess up (might have been the PCI SATA controller card) and both I have yet to recover the data on and I've worked on it off and on for three years.

 

[Joe C]

I had a 2004 windows xp machine with 2 gigs of RAM i used for sharing some folders on the network and it worked fine for that purpose until the two drives in RAID 1 decided to mess up (might have been the PCI SATA controller card) and both I have yet to recover the data on and I've worked on it off and on for three years.

Have you used anything other than Windows to access and recover data? I ask because Windows really sux when it comes to accessing data from a drive

 

[Jmcinvale]

Its something with the file table or MBR.

Thought RAID 1 was supposed to be for times like this but in this instance it didn't work.

Same thing happened with the same card only running one drive in around 2014 but I only lost 6 months of data which wasn't much. I then got a second drive and did a RAID 1 setup.

The way it failed is one day i couldn't access the shared folders and found the computer froze. Upon reboot it wouldn't boot.

I've tried many free programs to recover at least one drive.

 

[TechnoChicken]

Try something Linux...

 

[Jmcinvale]

I could but the only reason I would is to recover the data and not have a functional computer.

Nice thing is I have two drives with the same info on it so if I screw up one trying to fix I have another.

I'm tempted to just pay someone to do it who has all the proper tools and know how.

I might try connecting one drive to my windows 10 PC and see what I can do with it.

But that will wait until I get the current need of network storage taken care of.

Ill do my taxes in February and if I get enough back I'll buy one of those 2 or three bay NAS enclosures and install some good drives.

There's one that turns the drives off after a certain time of inactivity so I could then use two traditional drives.

I do have the Seagate 1TB drives that once I get the data restored and what I want put elsewheres those could be formatted and used as the drives themselves are ok. Its just the PCI SATA card I believe that somehow screwed the pooch.

 

[PP Mguire]

This is the inherent problem with RAID, and why it's not redundancy. Sticking just one drive on your W10 machine shouldn't work because it should require the RAID partition which needs both drives and the controller if that card is hardware RAID. If the controller isn't a hardware RAID solution then putting both drives on your machine to do a software RAID might work. Sounds like the controller is what failed (twice) and not really the drives or the RAID. I ditched RAID years ago because of these kind of issues.