“The further up the price and feature scale you go, the more constrained the design becomes”
@stardotpro
As sudden as a light bulb, the reader mailbox burst into life in mid-February. One particular question stood out: what’s the best add-on disk controller for a domestic, small NAS project?
Seems simple on first pass, right? So I dearly wish, but getting the right bits to run in the right way and actually work as protectors of your data is not the walk through a daisy-lined park that you might imagine. Contrary to the impression I may have given in previous columns, the entire storage business is a nightmarish labyrinth of not-really-compatible, but apparently perfectly standard, components and software.
Take a look at the storage market in devices for hosting centres, where replacement or expansion drives for heavyweight rack-mount storage expansion cages are very machine-specific. Many a support forum thread peters out because some hapless storage guy eventually admits that he thought the manufacturer label on an enterprise NAS drive was an entry point into a whole genealogy of related (and hopefully bigger) other drives
