IBM System Storage TS3100 Tape Library Model F4S 800 GB 1.6 TB

Advantages: Good price, excellent expandability
Disadvantages: Some HDD compatability issues to watch out for

...I purchased a 5200 RouStor from Scan in September 2007, to fulfil the need for a RAID capable network storage device for my home network. I chose this product over others due to the feature set you get for the price. I'd recommend this product to anyone looking for a device to hold data for their small office, or home - particularly home entertainment systems. You can fit a lot of music and videos on to one of these devices, and share data easily round your other Ethernet attached devices. The unit takes 5 SATA hard drives (they just screw into the caddies, which slot in the front - as per the picture). There is varying support of hard drive models, so for the unwary, you need to check the thecus.com website for compatibility. I chose 500GB Seagate Barracuda disks, to give me a raw storage total of 2.5TB. The unit is smaller than... Read review

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Advantages: power,redundancy,expandibility
Disadvantages: Price

...The configuration I use is : 2x Xeon 3.6GHz/800MHz (1MB L2 Cache), 4x 512MB ECC 133MHz SDRAM,48x-20x IDE CD-ROM drive, Dual Broadcom 5721 Gigabit Ethernet, ATI Radeon 7000M, IBM 5U x 24in Tower To Rack Conversion Kit ,5x146.4 GB 10 000 rpm Ultra320 80-pin hard drive,Serveraid 7k SCSI raid card, Remote supervisor Adapter II card. Operating System provided by IBM as well ( part number 90P0221) Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, Standard Edition. Packaging and manuals: Server is very well packaged,rack conversion comes with explanation for conversion, but the whole conversion is not intuitive at all.Picture provided in installation instructions not very helpful. Bit and pieces included in the packages ,as keyboard and mouse for Server.IBM Director and Serveraid manager CD, plus OS CDin the box, OS pre-installed. Set-Up. Set up is quite easy... Read review

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Advantages: Good points. Obscenely easy way to rebuild a corrupted server.
Disadvantages: Bad points. Limited hardware and software support. Make sure your operating system can read all partitions.

...all files that were in the temporary folder during the initial back up. Using an OBDR tape drive such as HP DDS-4 the total disk (18 GB) could be backed up in less than 1 hour, or more typically, with 3 GB of storage used, this could be backed up or restored in approximately 15 minutes. The only negative in this test came about when we looked at our FAT32 partition. As we were running NT4, the FAT32 partition couldn’t be read so couldn’t be backed up. Our disaster recovery despite all attempts to stop it from touching this partition went ahead and reformatted it, losing what could have been important data. To be fair this is more of an OS issue. The beauty of this system is that whenever you installed new software or reconfigure anything, a quick backup will make sure that should the worst happen this quick system provides for a simple... Read review

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