NAS and Raid

Have you considered off site backup?

look at http://www.HexiSTOR.com

They offer a product that is pretty cool..

It's quite a bit less expensive than buying hard drives. Plus, being offsite, it's quite a bit safer.

There are many raid levels. Level 5 is the current standard for our industry because it offers some redundancy and has low over head.

We have 2 4TB Raid level 5 going on at the office. The raid will allow you to read and write data much faster because you will write partial data to 7 drives at once. Level 5 Raid gives you some redundancy by writing parity data to other drives so one drive can fail and you will loose nothing. In addition we run a hot spare in both raids so that if a drive does fail the hot spare picks up so we would need to loose 3 drives at the same time to be SOL.

We also run a live back-up to an external drive just incase the server craps out. And lastly we do an offsite back-up nightly which transfers on average 50GB/night. For this my server connects to my home computer and dumps data to an external drive which is a mirror copy of about the last 10 days of our servers.

For the external drives we use http://www.iomega.com/direct/produc...&ASSORTMENT<>ast_id=63191&bmUID=1211167731393

If you have just one computer there is not really a need for an NAS, the drive I listed above will do just fine and they are pretty cost effective. They will do Raid 0 which is super fast with no redundancy or raid 1 which cuts your space in half but allows for drive failure without data loss. They are real easy to configure, just flip a switch for Raid 0 or 1.

Chili it all depends on how safe you want to be. At the offer we run almost exactly the same setup as Thump except mine gets a full backup every night and an incremental backup at lunch every day which is taken off site. In 15 years of running various RAID setups I have had 3 hard drives fail but none at the same time. Having the ability to hot swap a drive and let it rebuild is something I need at the office but I really doubt you need it as an individual. Level 5 is complete over kill for an individual IMO but a life saver when you have people that depend on the data and down time costs thousands or more per hour. Some kind of off site storage would be a good idea, how you get there is the question. DLT might be the best size/cost option but you have decide just how important the data is and what level of risk you will accept. If you want it backed up incase the computer dies is one thing but what if something happens to the place the computer lives? Fire, water, theft that is when off site is a life saver. The super cheap cost of HDD's makes it easy to store a massive amount of data but backing it up off site is still a problem needed to be solved by other means of either media or giant pipe to an offsite storage device.
:think:
Maybe get a removable drive tray and a couple of drives you can swap out. Throw one in you car or other location. Pretty inexpensive and pretty darn fast.

Chili said:

I've just rolled over the 1 TB of images to store for my photography business and am looking for new storage/backup options.

Currently I have multiple backups to several removable hard drives. I am consider one of those NAS setups with multiple huge hd's. Is there any advantage to this versus just taking an older pc and fillling it with huge hd's?

I don't need the file server capabilities of a NAS setup as any files I need to share can easily be moved around my internal network.

As far as RAID, is this a better option than keeping multiple backups?

Click to expand...

Well, here it goes.......

The advantage of a nas over an old pc is the ease of use imho. If you just put drives in a computer you either have to maintain software raid, or maintain drivers for raid hw. With a nas unit its just plug and go.


As far as raid better then multiple backups, well that depends on your needs. Certain levels of raid (1,5,0+1, etc) will protect against hard drive failure..... but keeping multiple copies in different locations will not only protect from hard drive failure but will also protect from other threats... water, fire, theft, etc.