8 Comments

Is the Fantom MegaDisk 1TB drive worth $335?

February 15, 2007 by in Gadgets with 8 Comments

Fantom 1TB external drive

OnSale.com is currently selling the Fantom 1TB MegaDisk external USB drive for $335. With the prices of hardrives continually falling, we can all expect to have that home storage setup of our dreams. The question now is, “how do you weed out the junk?” Based on the single review stating that the drive sounds like an airplane taking off, I’m not sure if these cheaply priced massive drives are worth exploring at this point in time.


  • http://www.iMachead.com Mark Fleser

    Keep in mind you get what you pay for, if you get a cheap drive (price) you’ll get a cheap drive (quality).

    Spend less than 50 bucks more and go for the LaCie and get a similar (on that same site) drive that adds FW 400 and 800 and will probably be quieter and more reliable.

  • http://www.recompiled.org/ Joe Eversole

    Roll your own. Linux, using software RAID mirroring RAID 5 if you buy enough drives. Throw in LVM to manage your partitions and allow hot growing and shrinking. Add a FS that allows hot grow/shrink (ReiserFS and XFS. ext3 allows growing but not shrinking). Use your sharing protocol of choice (NFS, APF, CIFS), and toss in some apache with torrentflux… mmm tasty.

    I used one of the Netgear NAS devices where you toss in two drives and install the software. It was slow, required proprietary software, and really didn’t like when two people tried accessing the same share at the same time.

    Obviously, this setup isn’t for everyone. But, it’s cheap and fun.

  • http://www.mcdevzone.com/ Mike C

    I just got a 1TB Buffalo TeraStation which cost twice as much but is well worth it. It’s a linux-based NAS device with 4x250GB drives, which I currently have configured as RAID 5.

  • http://ropiku.wordpress.com Piku

    @Joe Eversole
    Yeah it’s nice but it also consumes more power. But with a server you don’t do only storage, you can host your site (or develop on it), have yourself a mailserver, route your i-net connection (I have only one IP and don’t have a router) and many more (like having your gaming server).
    Also, have you tried OpenSolaris with ZFS ? ZFS it’s really cool, it can do software raid, lvm (disks are put in pools). It also works straight away with NFS.

  • Tech^CF

    Old machine, cheap SATA controllers, cheap disks – EVMS and everything and everything is fine

  • Stephen

    Mark, be careful with LaCie drive enclosures. The seem to have power supply problems.

  • Marc

    Confirmed…my recent LaCie purchase came with a bad power adapter, and it took two more shipments before I received one that worked properly.

  • http://addiqtmedia.com Addiqt:media

    Lacie have also switched drives. They used to use Western Digital and Seagate, which were great brands in terms of reliability, yet they have recently switched to the less reliable maxtor drives.

    Now that enclosure looks like a rebranded stardom enclousure, which has hardware RAID 0 support for two internal SATAs from memory, Expect to find two 500GB SATA drives in there IMO.

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