[geeks] NAS followup: Hammer Myshare

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

I spoke to someone at Hammer Storage Solutions about the Hammer Myshare
units, and they appear to do almost everything I want.

In particular, I got these answers:

	- the Hammer uses Maxtor, WD, and Hitachi drives
	- there is a bare unit available (*)
	- out of the box the Hammer serves ftp, NFS, CIFS, and SMB so it
	  takes care of most any network file sharing needs
	- the Hammer can use USB external drives formatted with ext3
	  filesystem

The latter makes me wonder if the Hammer might be hacked into supporting
BSD and other filesystems as well.  Basically, anything that Linux can
support.

That was the first sticking point with me, because I have ext3 USB hard
drives and would have hated formatting them FAT32 or NTFS.

I guess now the issue is the performance hit I'll get by moving to
network storage.

On the other hand, now all of the OS on my desktop machine and all other
machines will have access to the same files.

Plus, backups across the board. 

In time, I can see building a *real* file server, one with RAID 5 and
maybe even a tape drive for long-term storage, but that's a lot more
money and I can wait on that one.

I have a business need for that coming, but I have more time to plan for
it. That, I probably would definitely build myself.

I'm real close to doing it anyway, but I don't need the space yet, and
drives just keep getting cheaper, so...

*
	I cannot find any bare (no drives) Hammer Myshare units.  That's
	what I want because I prefer Seagate drives.  I'd be especially
	worried if I got a unit with Maxtor drives.

	If anyone knows where to buy a Hammer Myshare with no drives, empty,
	please let me know.


-- 
shannon           | An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto 
                  | one blade of grass and not fall off the face of the earth.