As our latest project comes to a close and we face losing any unused capital we again raise the idea of network storage with the boss. It's something we have mentioned repeatedly and suddenly find ourselves with an offer of whatever we can get for £1000. Taking our initiative from the US government we decide why buy one device when we could buy two of these? Thus we have one for our network project and finally a decent sized device for our own backups.

A quick look under the hood reveals two Hitachi deskstar 1TB drives which are mounted at the front of the case. This is a joy to see as Hitachi drives are my personal favourites after a review I saw showed they were almost on a par with Western Digitals Raptors in terms of speed, but with decent capacity and a lower price tag. The drives are linked by a single moulded power and data cable to the drive controller card under the right side of the case. That second drive could be a bit tricky to replace due to the strange curvy plastic indicator rods which light up that front status panel. They stretch out over the front of the second drive bay. Removing a single screw releases the drive mounting clips and there are two more screws fixing the clip to the actual drive. Fantastic, who wants to undo more screws than necessary when you're in a hurry to get the device up and running again. At this point I realise that to change a drive I would only have to undo the screws in the front feet of the device. Putting it back together I notice the shock hazard warning below the top screw on the back of the case and can't help thinking they should have made that bigger and stuck a big label on it somewhere which says "To replace drives, unscrew front feet and remove front panel". Luckily I know better than to go prodding capacitors.

Out of the box, the device is set for raid zero, ie it has a total of 2TB of storage space (Thats's 2048GB unformatted which is equivalent to 435 blank DVD's or over 2800 blank CD's). Of course there's little point using the drive in this way when you can set it up as raid one. This means you have two drives, one of which is a mirror image of the other. If one drive dies, hopefully everything will still be intact on the other and will get copied to the newly replaced drive.

Still it was at this point that I discovered the Achilles heel of this device. It's the time taken to set up the raid array and reformat the drives (which brings your storage capacity down from 2TB to 923.8GB fully formatted and took about 16 hours to complete). How useful this device is now depends on how much data you have. Use a 1TB drive in your desktop and you should be able to back it up entirely, even having space free if you use something like Ghost to compress your drive image first. Have 2TB of data to backup and you will probably need to leave it as raid zero.

However before I would buy one of these devices I would have to research a blu-ray alternative. A while back I read about a company called Delkin producing blu-ray discs which were guaranteed to keep their data for 200 years. The discs may cost around £13 to store only 25GB but there are other things to consider. In the past decade hard drives have gone from the IDE interface to SATA/SATA2 but you can still read a CD in a DVD-rewriter drive. Given that internal blu-ray drives can now be bought for less than £100 you only have the capacity requirements to factor in.

So to conclude; a fantastic backup device but don't rush out until you've seen what blu-ray has to offer. If you can't split your important data into 25GB chunks then you won't go wrong with one of these although it's pricey compared to installing two fresh internal drives.