Multiple HDD Setup?

spicymchaggis

What would be the best / safest way to set up 4 or 5 of the same hdd's. Same brand / size and model so as to not lose any data. It wouldnt be running anything labour intensive. Just videos, music, pictures and backed up files etc...

Monotype

Best way to keep backups is to store a few of the drives externally and backup every so often. This can save you from power surges etc., as well as hard drive failure.

To protect against hard drive failure, you could store them in RAID... say RAID 10 which would mirror the drives as well as stripe them for better performance. Your only get half the space though as everything is stored twice.

WD Reds are fairly good for low power and good performance. It might be worthwhile investing in a small NAS - this allows you to have a degree of separation from your main system. They can be expensive though - starting around €300 for a 4 bay one. You could probably build your own but generally, it can be a bit more trouble to get the same management tools and low power consumption.

uberpixie

Bear in mind with RAID, RAID is not a backup....

The easiest backup solution is to have an external usb drive or 2 that you back up to once a week or a month.

After that: have a secondary hard drive in your PC that you synch up to once a week.

To perform a synch to an internal or external harddrive you can use off the shelf software or use built in command line tools in windows like ROBOCOPY. http://ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html

After that you can look at RAID if you like. Have a look here:
https://www.icc-usa.com/raid-calculator

This site gives a basic description of each raid type, how many hard drives you need and how much space you end up with.

If you are thinking of using a NAS....

Have a look at a HP Microserver: makes a good backup server and can more flexible that an on the shelf NAS for €248.32. Will take x4 harddrives but you need to setup an OS yourself and put in a little elbow grease to get it running.

http://www.dabs.ie/products/hp-proliant-microserver-turion-ii-neo-n54l-2-2ghz-2gb-ram-250gb-hdd-8JPK.html?q=hp%20microserver&src=16

spicymchaggis

I just want some way of having massive storage with some way of making sure I dont lose a whole drives worth of stuff if one drive goes.
thanks for the input

unRAID is popular for your kind of use. It requires a dedicated machine. If you google it you'll find forums with lots of people building massive 20TB+ unRAID rigs.

FlexRAID is similar in concept but runs inside your existing OS. I use it. Also SnapRAID is a free alternative.

These are all geared around unstriped JBOD arrays with a dedicated parity drive (or drives). I would need to know your level of understanding before explaining the difference between these type of setups and traditional RAID levels like RAID 5

spicymchaggis

well i know what raid 0,1,10, 5 and 6 is. i know what JBOD, parity and stripped and unstripped is

Serephucus

I'd go for FlexRAID as well. Once I get money together for a batch of hard drives, that's what I'll be switching to.

Planning on RAID 5 (eventually 6) for movies, etc. and a straight 1:1 backup for the important documents.

spicymchaggis

Serephucus wrote: »

I'd go for FlexRAID as well. Once I get money together for a batch of hard drives, that's what I'll be switching to.

Planning on RAID 5 (eventually 6) for movies, etc. and a straight 1:1 backup for the important documents.

cheers. I'll have to read into to this in depth and see how it works

spicymchaggis

spicymchaggis wrote: »

well i know what raid 0,1,10, 5 and 6 is. i know what JBOD, parity and stripped and unstripped is

In that case I reckon you'll understand them fairly well just from the description. Conceptually they (unRAID, FlexRAID and SNAPRAID to a lesser extent) are more or less the same - an unstriped array of data drives with a separate parity drive. They may have virtual pooling options to appear as one large array but deep down its just a bunch of disks each with their own filesystem.

In the case of Flexraid you can have as many parity drives as you want, and recover from that many failed data drives. unRAID only supports a single parity drive at the moment.

There is some obvious advantages/disadvantages compared to say RAID 5.

These setups lend themselves to media storage very well, where you're not bothered about throughput and are mostly reading from the array and not making a lot of changes to the data.

spicymchaggis

flexiraid after some reading on it seems like the one for me, that is if this is the same software http://www.flexraid.com/,
just have to see which version to buy now.
appreciate all the help

Yes that's it. I would play around with the trial version for a while before deciding if it is right for you. If you have some spare disks you should create a pretend array, simulate disk failure etc to get a feel for how it works.