[nelamvr6]

All the more reason to go with a solution like the ReadyNAS. If one of your hard drives goes south, you don't even have to power down the box. You just replace the HDD and the RAID rebuilds itself.

 

[Wodgy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by leqin /img/forum/go_quote.gif Two 1 terror byte SAN's - oh and you maybe need to rethink your idea on hardrive reliability...

This is very true. Even the manufacturers themselves don't expect hard drives to last 5 years. Toshiba, for instance, specs theirs for 5 years or 20,000 powered-on-hours, which actually works out to just over 2 years.

You don't need to run a RAID; mirroring your drive every night or every week is fine, but whatever choice you make, it's not a good idea to keep all your data only on one drive. You need at least two of every drive you buy.

 

[dmk005]

Ahhh, now the news of Netgear acquiring Infrant makes even more sense. Infrant has the ReadyNAS patent and product to boot. Should be a good match in my book.

 

[Nebby]

I built my own file server with a sata raid card and three drive cages. Two are populated and are running in raid 5. Capacity is at 3.8TB, but it's not all for music, it stores my HD videos too

 

[dmk005]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nebby /img/forum/go_quote.gif I built my own file server with a sata raid card and three drive cages. Two are populated and are running in raid 5. Capacity is at 3.8TB, but it's not all for music, it stores my HD videos too

So you can stand to lose one drive and lose nothing but if you lose two you're sunk? How fault tolerant are you?

By the way, I only ask because I am trying to figure my resulting solution based on what I am learning. I don't want to spend more than 1K.

 

[justin2net]

well readynas is slow if you have slimserver on it and a huge library. i'd rather get a box with a areca 1210 and 4 t7k500 drives in raid5. plus if the infrant psu goes bonkers, they all of your drives are gone. well, same thing with a single box solution. i guess interchange the harddrives often using drive cages and put a pair in the bank vault.

 

[Nebby]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dmk005 /img/forum/go_quote.gif So you can stand to lose one drive and lose nothing but if you lose two you're sunk? How fault tolerant are you? By the way, I only ask because I am trying to figure my resulting solution based on what I am learning. I don't want to spend more than 1K.

I have two hot spare drives ready to take over, so as long as the second drive doesn't fail before the first drive rebuild is complete I am safe. Aside from that I do have proper backups of my critical data. When deciding what solution you are going to go for, remember to ask yourself what your priorities are; expandability? power usage? redundancy? I know you probably already have taken those factors into account, but just trying to give my 2cents

edit: woot, post 199!

 

[D1g1talV3n0m]

I use a 250GB WD Firewire HD.

 

[majid]

I am still setting up, but I bought a Sun Ultra 40 M2 workstation (8 drive slots) and 6x 750GB Seagate drives in a 2.7TB ZFS RAID-Z2 array (dual parity, I can lose two drives before my data is at risk). I benchmarked it at 160MBps sustained block I/O.

You could do much the same with 4 drives, a readily available 4-port SATA motherboard, a reasonably quiet case like the Antec Sonata III and still squeak under your $1000 budget.

You still need external Firewire/USB drives for off-site backup. An alternative would be to rsync your data to another location (e.g. your office), but that is very slow - it took me 3 months to backup 100GB remotely, running rsync every night from midnight to 9AM.

 

[eyeteeth]

500GB USB Western Digtal external.
Quote:

Originally Posted by Wodgy /img/forum/go_quote.gif This is very true. Even the manufacturers themselves don't expect hard drives to last 5 years. Toshiba, for instance, specs theirs for 5 years or 20,000 powered-on-hours, which actually works out to just over 2 years. You don't need to run a RAID; mirroring your drive every night or every week is fine, but whatever choice you make, it's not a good idea to keep all your data only on one drive. You need at least two of every drive you buy.

At some point I'll get one or two more externals but for now with only one external drive, every 4+GB of WAV converted to FLAC and tagged gets burned to a DVD.

 

[Sketch]

lossless backups on DVD, keep lossy on PC

 

[dmk005]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sketch /img/forum/go_quote.gif lossless backups on DVD, keep lossy on PC

Can you please explain this?

 

[dmk005]

Quote:

Originally Posted by majid /img/forum/go_quote.gif I am still setting up, but I bought a Sun Ultra 40 M2 workstation (8 drive slots) and 6x 750GB Seagate drives in a 2.7TB ZFS RAID-Z2 array (dual parity, I can lose two drives before my data is at risk). I benchmarked it at 160MBps sustained block I/O. You could do much the same with 4 drives, a readily available 4-port SATA motherboard, a reasonably quiet case like the Antec Sonata III and still squeak under your $1000 budget. You still need external Firewire/USB drives for off-site backup. An alternative would be to rsync your data to another location (e.g. your office), but that is very slow - it took me 3 months to backup 100GB remotely, running rsync every night from midnight to 9AM.

Whaoh, mini data center. Do you have spare controllers on hand? Also, If your controller burns out, how does your replacement controller know how retain your configuration?

 

[Assorted]

A network storage drive.

 

[matt8268]

Store them on my main C drive, with nightly synchronization to a second internal drive via Karen's Replicator. Also make occasional backups onto an external drive which I keep at work.