To Stora or not to Stora

About a year ago, I bought a Netgear Stora, and it has been one of the best purchases I have made.  For the uninitiated it looks like this:

Not much to look at is it?  Well, its what's on the inside that counts.  This little beauty connects to my home network and gives me 1TB of network storage.  That's a good start, but what's really cool about it is that I can access it from anywhere in the world, it acts as an itunes server, it lets me stream movies, audio and pictures to other devices in my home, like my PS3.  Oh, and if the hard drive fails, there is a spare one in there with everything backed up to it.  So, I like it, and so what, well, did I mention, it was pretty cheap too.  If you bought one today the chassis would cost about £70 and disks are £40 each.

Anyway, that's enough of the preamble, the problem I have is that it is now full.  Yup, you heard right, in the space of 12 months I've stuffed the little thing full of movies, tv series, music, and pictures (including a few too many uncompressed SLR piccies too from various holidays).  So what to do?  Well, I could delete some stuff, I could archive it off the network onto other computers or external hard drives, or I could even delete some of the lesser used content.  I believe that a well organised network is going to be more sustainable and reliable than a disorganised one and so to fragment my data doesn't sound like a great idea.  Its time to get more storage and more storage on the network.  Hmmm, this sounds like it might cost.

As a true engineer, its time to list my options:

• Upgrade existing disks (put larger ones in)
• Pro's - Cheap ~£60 per 2TB drive
• Cons - Compatibility risk, not straight forward data migration
• Buy new NAS unit
• Pros - Easy data migration, loads to choose from, expandable
• Cons - More expensive, starting at £280 for a chassis then £60 per disk
• Do nothing
• Pros - cheap, low labour cost
• Cons - still have nowhere to store data, unit becomes full, unreliable

There are some really nice new units out at the moment, my personal favourite is the QNAP:

Its not as cheap as the Stora, £280 for the box and £60 per drive.  It holds up to 4 drives, so that comes in at £520 for what is close to 6TB of storage.  In my experience, I have been doubling the volume of data every year, so this should give me about 2.5 years worth of use.  Here is where the problem lies.  Technology moves on at a startling rate, by the time I fill this up it will be obsolete, spare drives will no longer be available and it will have cost £200/yr.  As I can get another year's worth of use out of the Stora for £120 quid, I think I'll go for the upgrade option, slightly more fiddly but in a years time NAS' will be more prevalent in the home user market and hopefully they will be cheaper.  Shame really, I was looking forward to getting a new toy ;)