Somebody posted some nonsense. George posted some more nonsense. I don't have all day to respond to nonsense.

This discussion is rapidly descending into farce as typified by the above statement, which is an example of what the Americans refer to as a straw man argument. Here’s the definition of that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

Here are the facts.
1. “You retain all ownership rights in your Content”. (source: ToS)
2. You grant them a license to your content with potentially wide scope except for one thing; they or anyone else they assign the license to are unable to sell any content on.

Here is the question: under what specific circumstances could they do anything with your content that would harm your interests?

Alas George that is again a statement which does not correspond with the facts; in other words it is a lie.

1. You grant them a royalty free license for the use of the content *specifically* on their site or related sites/services. This is most likely for as innocent a purpose as being able to copy the content between physical disks, distribute it via the internet, etc.

2. You grant them the right to sub-license on the same terms. This is likely for something as innocent as enabling moving the business to a different holding company, or a merger, acquisition or other combination of the business. In any case it specifically precludes selling of the content to third parties since all sub-licences must be granted on the same terms ie royalty free. This is regardless of well established licensing law that would preclude a licensee from selling on intellectual property rights so acquired.

Matt is, however, right; if you believe you are sitting on a goldmine of stock photos then you should probably find another solution. On the other hand if you are looking for convenient off site backup at a price that’s right then in my view it looks a reasonable proposition.

Well if true that would certainly be both absurd and shocking, but it is patently not the case.

Here is what the ToS says:

“Ownership of Content: You retain all ownership rights in your Content. However, by posting Content to Oosah, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Oosah (and its successors) an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, assignable, royalty free, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, distribute and to prepare derivative works of such Content in connection with the Site and any current and future services offered by Oosah, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.”

http://www.oosah.com/terms.php?ref=&pos=

You can read that with varying shades of paranoia but your claim of granting them an exclusive license to the content is explicitly false.

No affiliation and no experience but looks interesting:

http://www.oosah.com/

Thanks very much for your detailed notes Pete.

My inclination would be to keep everything out of sight within the box and I do have a spare bay under my DVD drive that I see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to use, except that the documentation seems adamant that it is for an optical drive only.

That said I must say your external solution looks quite nifty; I had no idea such something so elegant was possible.

Again many thanks.

Many thanks for your comments on my issue.

Woodworm, I already have an external drive and a weekly backup schedule, but Sod’s law dictates that disaster will strike at the worst possible time. I also run 64-bit Win XP on my main machine and strongly suspect I would face a mountain of trouble using data restored to another operating system; would much prefer to minimise the risk of having to go that route in every way possible.

Iceblinker, I also have Dell, and the machine in question has a 5000x motherboard, while the system reports that the Raid controller is called Intel 631ESB/632xESB which I assume is onboard.

My Dell documentation makes no reference to the possibility of running multiple Raid configurations, but the Intel configuration utility (Matrix Storage Manager) help file in fact does:

“RAID 10 (Striping and mirroring)

RAID level 10 uses four hard drives to create a combination of RAID levels 0 and 1. The data is striped across a two-disk array forming a RAID 0 component. Each of the drives in the RAID 0 array is mirrored by a drive in the RAID 1 array. This configuration provides the benefits of the performance of RAID 0 and the redundancy of RAID 1.”

This sounds like exactly what I am after but there are two problems. Firstly the documentation appears to say it is impossible to migrate from a 2 disk Raid 0 to a 4 disk Raid 10. I find that odd given the description and wonder whether they merely mean that you can’t convert a 2 disk array to a 4 disk due to the laws of physics. Do you have any info on this?

My second problem is that the computer chassis only has dedicated space for a 3rd hard disk according to the documentation. I need to open the thing up and see if I can cram an extra one in there somewhere; perhaps I’ll be able to swap one for the 3.5” floppy drive I originally believed to be a configuration masterstroke but have subsequently not used once However, any tinkering is going to have to wait until things calm down considerably in my day job.

Maybe so but all other things being equal a smaller disk must be faster than a larger disk, due to the need for the read/write heads to traverse more physical and logical disk divisions.

Further, the high capacity disks I have seen have all been 7,200 rpm which must be a significant performance factor versus the smaller 10,000/15,000rpm disks.

Anyway, one thought occurred to me on this subject; I have a matched pair of 160Gb 10,000 rpm drives configured in a Raid 0 stripe on my main desktop. Does anybody know whether it is possible to add a 3rd disk in a redundant RAID configuration? And if so would that in any way have performance implications? Would appreciate any advice.

The wonders of technology never cease to amaze

However, that massive amount of storage at that price must involve some trade-offs and based on the user comment from the eBuyer site it seems that performance is the obvious candidate:

(from your link) “Despite copying over a 1Gbit network, I was only getting transfer speeds of around 3MB/s”

Further, if you are running 6 windows machines in a small (peer to peer?) network there is going to be a lot of low level network chatter that may be overloading the undoubtedly limited processing power of the drive unit.

I would try disconnecting 5 of the 6 machines from the network to see whether that improves performance towards the 3 Mb/s transfer rate obtained by the eBuyer poster. If that works out you will need something with much more oomph to get acceptable performance.

This sounds very improbable to me and may be your problem.

I am not aware of any 1Tb PC style hard disks on the market. The largest I have seen are 750Gb and pricy, and would expect you have a pair of matched 500Gb drives in your NAS.

As such if you are seeing a single drive letter when you try to write to the NAS there is a probably a file allocation/management black box sitting somewhere and causing the slowdown. Unravel the mysteries of that or unbundle the drives and you should get the sort of speed you are expecting.