Go to your local Staples / Best Buy / Office Depot, etc, and buy a few hard drives to use to temporarily back up your stuff. After the backup is complete, return them to the store saying that they "didn't work" and that you DON'T want to replace it because you "no longer trust the brand".
Buy the drives from seperate stores if it'd make you feel better.
Dishonest? Nah. The reseller will send them back to maxtor / wd / seagate, and they will "refurbish" the drive and just sell it again.

okay, its a LITTLE dishonest, but I'd be lying to say I hadn't done it at least a dozen times.

Just logris tendril a 22nd century storage technology that's back-compatible.

Are you kidding? Trying to summon the Logrus to aid with Ghostwheel would most certainly result in someone's death. Or even an imbalance over the Pattern!

It's obvious he must use the spikard instead.

(/me sighs at how pathetic this will look in the morning)

Hmmm - do I sense an Amber FanBoy?

I misspelled something. Worse, something geeky.

Goodbye, cruel world!

How about this?
Some of them brag about "unlimited storage", and some have a "Trial period" for free...
Read on ourself ;-)

Before you start, it might be a good idea to break out the calculator and determine whether you can actually transfer all your data to the online service in less than 15 days. Just a thought. ;o)

This is in your own backyard... maybe they could be persuaded to 'upgrade' one of their systems for a day ;-)

500 gmail accounts
nuff said
i have 15 invites, you want?

:)

That is of course a mission critical element, IF the project MUST be totally free of charge... wiseguy!

I have about 100 available RAID'ed Gigs to pitch in, if that's at all interesting. Perhaps you could start a list for people who are willing to donate significant amounts of hard drive space?

Come to think of it, I even have an extra 200 GB drive you can borrow.

Even with donated storage, getting the data off of Ghostwheel would be a problem. I only have 256Kbps of upstream bandwidth, and Comcast would flip out and terminate my service with a vengeance if I uploaded 500 gigs in one month.

Well, if you could raise another 300 GB, you would be all set.

DVD is probably cheaper than tape backup. Using GNU tar, -L will let you span tapes. I'm sure you can do the same with DVDs. Buy a stack of DVDs, and burn your files. It'll probably take you about three hours.

There's probably better software than tar for this, too.

An 8x DVD burner can be had for less than $90, and the media will run you less than $20. That's cheaper than a harddrive, let alone another raid controller. Much cheaper than tape.

Well, I had to force myself to read it again after I accidentally accused Ryan of being Corwin (as opposed to Merlin) upon the christening of Ghostweel. I had to set myself straight, see.

As far as I know, normal blank DVDs hold about 4.7 GB, so 500 GB of data would require some 100+ discs. Three hours may be a bit of an optimistic estimate for burning that many.

Whoops. I was thinking 10 disks. Missed a zero. Still, a spindle of 100 isn't that expensive, and an 8x burner will do a disk in 10 minutes or so. So, 1000 minutes is only like 17 hours.

If you borrow Greystork's 200 gig drive, and use it for the first 200 gigs, then you'll only need like 10 hours.

A 12x DVD drive will bring the time for a DVD-only solution down to like 11 hours. You can get those for like $200.

You are going to run into this problem again some day, so you might as well get a new controller now that supports online capacity expansion. Then bye that new drive and borrow that 200 Gig drive from Greystork, and you should have room for almost all of your data.
Install the new controller with the 3 current disks and restore your data onto it. Finally you can grow the raid with the new disk.

Surely, there must be some kind of PQMagic-like ware that will do RAID. Even if you have to pay $50-100 for it, it will be better than all the other solutions proposed so far.

My ISP could care less how much bandwidth I use. the only person that would care is me, because my ping would be through the roof.

My favorite ISP in the entire world is Speakeasy. They wouldn't blink at 500 gigs of upstream traffic. In fact, they'd probably call to congratulate me or something.

Sadly, my house is in a DSL-less void, so cable was our only option.

Curious question : Wich controller would you recomend ?

I have cable as well. Cable is so much better then DSL anyway.

3Ware escalade 9500s-8. I like 3Ware because they have FreeBSD drivers and thy have decent performance.
Price isn't too bad in US 479$

I would be willing to send in my 80gb drive if you would of course send it back with the money for postage.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/30/168235&mode=thread&tid=129&tid=137&tid=188&tid=198
50gb dvd burner will be out soon, if your not in a rush you can wait a few months for the price to drop (i am guessing they will be expensive).

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/ADSL-Bandwidth-Management-HOWTO/implementation.html#AEN166

that should help with your ping problems, I set it up on my Linux NAT box and its great! very easy to setup to, about 5-10 mins. and its going.

yes please
thanks