Disk-hosting Service

Home directories are resilient but necessarily rather limited. Store space is resilient, larger but comes at an expense. Sometimes resilience isn't worth paying for: the temptation is to buy a USB drive and plug it in, or to ask for an additional disk to be installed in a workstation. Both these solutions have downsides: USB drives can get damaged (by being knocked off a desk, or baking in a hot office) or stolen; putting extra disks in workstations causes configuration effort and makes it harder to replace one workstation with another.

The "disk-hosting" service aims to offer an alternative to these. Buy a disk and the IT team will put it in a server and make it accessible to you across the network. The disk remains yours, as does the risk of failure (if the disk fails, the IT team will extract it and return it to you; their commitment ends there). This service is offered at no-cost and aims to be more reliable than office-based disks (USB or in workstations) by virtue of having the disks in a temperature-controlled, secure server room.

How to get it? Mail help@maths and ask -- we'll ask you to provide a disk (perhaps from World of Computers, Scan or via UFS). The drive will need to be 3.5-inch, SATA. We''re happy to check the model will be compatible before you buy it. If you would like to provide two disks, we can arrange for data to be mirrored.

N.B. Enterprise drives are intended to run 24/7, desktop drives are not. You might like to review the terms and conditions of any warranties offered to see whether putting them in a server invalidates the warranty.