I was at the store yesterday, picking up a pack of recordable DVDs for backup purposes, when I saw that the MyBook external drives had dropped in price. I’d been drooling over them for a long time, and that proved to be the final straw… I walked out with a one-terabyte dual-drive network-accessible version.

As soon as I got back to the office, and before I even opened the packaging, I got on the ‘net to make sure that it would work okay with Linux as well as Windows. To my surprise and delight, I discovered that it isn’t just a plain old external drive like I’m used to, but an actual headless (no monitor/keyboard/mouse) Linux machine itself! It didn’t take long to find this page, which offers a lot of information on it, including a way to get a secure SSH server running on it, which I immediately did.

After playing with it for a while, I set it to reformat itself as a RAID-1 system (where the second drive is a mirror image of the first, protecting against hardware failure of one of the drives). The formatting didn’t take long, but it took several hours to “synchronize” the second drive to the first, even though both were all but empty. Once that was done, it was ready to go.

It’s fast. It’s fairly quiet. It’s network accessible, and can even be made Internet accessible (though I don’t have that set up at present). All in all, it’s pretty darned spiffy. 🙂