You have digital photos, movies and that novel you’ve been working for the past three years. You need to put it some place. You have “your stuff,” as iomega would say. (Who here is old enough to remember the ZIP drive advertising campaign in the late 90s ?) So what about getting an enterprise storage solution for your data?

• Use An External Hard Drive - Lots of companies make them now. Maxtor, Seagate, LaCie (pronounced like the French “la-see,” meaning “the Company”) and Western Digital all make pretty good ones. Prices are dropping all the time. Those are great, because they work just like a flash drive. You plug them in and your digital storage is ready to go. Just drag things onto the drive. You can always find good deals on those at NewEgg. You can get 2.5″ portable versions and 3.5″ standard desktop versions. You can also get fancier ones that come with FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 interfaces. The FireWire 400 is not much faster than USB 2.0, which has a nominal 480 Mbps transfer rate. Don’t forget to format it before the first time you use it - most drives come pre-formatted to FAT. If you’re using Windows, you want NTFS; if you’re on a Mac, you want Journaled HFS+. If you don’t know how to format it, ask a tech savvy friend.
• Understand Limitations Of External Hard Drives - Be aware that all drives can be a little flimsy, especially the 2.5″ versions. If you intend to use it for valuable data, be sure to always have at least one current backup. External drives that physically travel between different locations frequently tend to fail a lot more often than ones that are left in one location. Drives that are left on constantly also seem to fail more often than drives that are only occasionally used. (However, if you intend to use the drive for on-line storage, don’t turn it on/off constantly, as the power-cycling is worse than leaving it on all the time).
• Use An Old Mac OS X Box - You’d be surprised to find that Mac OS X computers, even old ones with a G4 processor, make pretty good home servers. Mac OS X has a Windows fileserver functionality built in called samba. The old Apple G4s are also very expandable, with support for up to three internal EIDE hard drives. If you have one of these sitting in a closet, it’s time to turn it into a fileserver/media server.
• Try Ethernet-Enabled External Hard Drives - Tip Dude learned about these not long ago. They’re basically an external hard drive with a small computer attached that runs samba (or some other proprietary file server program). You plug them into the network and they look like a server to any computer on the local network. If you don’t want the expense of maintaining a separate computer for a server, these devices are quite convenient.
• Use DVD Writers - These are good for medium term off-line data storage. DVD media is cheap and the drives are fairly common at this point. They’re not intended for on-line storage though; they’re more suitable for backup and archiving. They can also be very annoying, because the DVD standard is far from uniform and later media is not backwards compatible with earlier drives. Sometimes you’ll need firmware upgrades. To make matters worse, there are DVD-R and DVD+R discs which are not the same. Most drives now are universal. If you’re buying a new drive, make sure you buy a well-supported brand so you will continue to be able to upgrade the firmware. For more information on backing up your computer, see Tip Dude’s Top Ten Tips - Backing Up Your Computer.
• Use Your Internal Hard Drives - These are not a bad idea if you already have a desktop computer and it has expandable drive bays. They tend to be cheaper, somewhat more reliable, and provide seamless on-line storage so that you don’t even have to think about having a separate file server. The down side is that it can be hard to move the drive from one location to another: you’d have to move the entire computer, or painstakingly remove the installed drive from the computer.
• Security Isn’t a Joke - Set the server password to something non-trivial. Passwords with both lower and upper case letters as well as numbers, are the best. Of course, no one in your household is probably going to hack your server and delete your files. But you never know if someone will sit in a nearby car and steal your wireless internet and discover that your server isn’t secured with a password. Or someone might accidentally change the settings on your firewall to allow internet traffic to come into your home network and therefore open up your private fileserver to the whole wide world. To be on the safe side, put a non-trivial password on the fileserver.
• Use an Actual Server - There is no shame in buying a cheap old enterprise server to use as a home server. However, this is typically the more expensive way to do things, because old server parts will be hard to obtain and enterprise servers tend to need a lot more looking after to function properly. That aside, the newer home-version of the technology will probably end up being cheaper and taking up less physical space. But on the other hand, you might like the cool clicking sound that an array of SCSI disks make. If you’re looking for an old server, IBM eServers have a pretty good reputation, but third-party rack mounted kits will also do the job quite adequately. A silver Apple Xserve definitely looks cool in that server rack, though.
• Have A Server (Physical) Location - If you choose to buy a rack mountable server, you should mount it in a rack. Server racks can be expensive, so think twice about buying a rack mountable server. If you’re not sure you want to rackmount your servers, you can buy a convertible one that is in a desktop case, but could be mounted into a rack with brackets if you decide later to buy a rack. If you’re using the external hard drives, you should at least put them someplace safe and not somewhere where they are likely to get knocked over. Generally, on top of the computer is a bad place for them. Somewhere on top of a counter surface or desk is a good location. If the drive is permanent, you might think about sticking it to the desk with some kind of office putty, such as Blu-Tack.
• Understand Your Server Environment - Excessive heat can damage hard drives. If you’re running the servers or hard drives in a spare room, be sure that the room is kept cool. Don’t put the hard drives or servers next to a heater, for example. If you do choose to put your servers or external hard drives in a storage closet, ensure that the closet has adequate ventilation. Be aware that there is a maximum limit to the length of the USB cable. It’s about 16 feet, so it is probably not enough to stretch from your desk to the closet. If you don’t want the drive to be near the computer, or have a laptop, you should consider either a server or a Ethernet-enabled external hard drive.

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