look, I will make this simple (and insulting). Do you know what you can do for 40 bucks - you can get lunch for you and your co worker. That's it. You can't do ANYTHING for 40 bucks. People see that 500 Gig drives for 60 bucks at
http://www.newegg.com, and think that "everyone is ripping them off" and they can have shared video storage for 200 bucks. Well, guess what - YOU CANT. You know what you can get for 200 bucks - a crappy disk drive product. Cheap shared storage will cost you over 10 grand, and expensive shared storage will cost you over 60 grand. A decent RAID 5 RAID array is going to be over 4 grand from ANYONE - and when you see these cheapo RAID 5 boxes for $1500, they are not hardware RAID 5 controllers.
But this is the SAN networks forum. What can you have for 40 bucks - a kick in the pants off this forum. Shared storage is expensive - it's dramatically cheaper than what is was in the recent past, but it's still expensive, and even the easiest systems are not plug and play. The labor to install a shared storage system (even the cheap ones) is more than you want to spend for the entire system.
My advice - keep moving those Icydock boxes back and forth between your computers.
Bob Zelin
