Intel Entry Storage System SS4200-E

Hi!

For a while, I'd been dreading a hard drive crash. We have hundreds of gigabytes of movies, music, and pictures. Losing any of it, especially the pictures, would be devastating. Creating back-up discs was an option, but not a very pleasant one since Brandi shoots her pictures in RAW format. It also didn't make sense for movies. What I wanted was a RAID system that I could connect directly to my network. Enter the Intel Entry Storage System SS4200-E.



The Intel Entry Storage System SS4200-E became available last year for employees to purchase directly from the company store for ~$250. It holds four hard drives, can be configured for RAID 5, and can connect directly to my network. Perfect. The only question was: What kind of hard drives should I put into it? Even though the documentation didn't guarantee they'd work, I decide to go for Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB SATA drives. Mostly because I want a LOT of storage, but also because a friend turned me on to a REALLY GREAT deal and I was able to get four for ~$500. Here's a picture of me installing them.



It was really quite easy. The drives aren't actually attached to the frame. Small screws with plastic knobs attach to the drive. These knobs are trapped between two hinged parts of the frame, then secured together. No problem! I plugged it in, attached it to the network, and installed the configuration software. After a bit of a scare as the configuration software seemed to be confused as to whether it needs an upgrade, I saw this on My Computer:



Very cool! It took a LONG time to copy all of the files from two 750GB FreeAgent drives (longer than I would have thought), but it seems to be working just fine. We have the media read by an XBOX Media Center to get it into the living room, so I decided we might as well have the server in the same cabinet as the TV and XBMC. The XBMC already had a network connection, so I just bought a ~$30 four-port switch by Linksys and used it to connect the XBMC, storage server, and our Nintendo Wii to the router.



I imagine that it won't be long before we'll buy a new TV, so at least we'll be ready with the rest of the equipment! Now that we have the storage, our next project is to digitize all of our old VHS tapes. If you have any suggestions regarding a convenient (and inexpensive) way of doing that, please let me know.

Thanks,
Matt