Hi all, I'm after some ideas / suggestions on what to do regarding my media storage. Currently I have a NAS (4*1TB) RAID5 giving a total 3TB of space availble (it's about 92% full). Recently the NAS has started playing up & reports a failed disk every so often (about 3-6 weeks). I have managed to catch the failures & got the array to rebuild by replacing the failed disk. Luckily I do have a regular backup, but as this is USB it will be painful to restore, but definately better than lossing 3TB. It's probably my fault as I used green drives. I'm now looking at binning off this NAS & splitting up the data across multiple drives. I've been looking at buying 3 * single bay NAS enclosures each containing a 3TB drive. One will be for documents & photos etc, one for media / tv, one for a backup & the USB will backup the documents. My logic for this is that I can have 2 NAS drives that aren't used a lot going into power-saving mode & only the one NAS drive that's used most of the time running at full power, (I'll probably use a higher end drive / WD RED in that one). The only problem I see with this is that it may still eat up power having 3 NAS & 1 USB drives running constantly (even if the 2/3 NAS's are in power saving mode). Would it be better buying 1 single NAS (for backup) & a two bay NAS (for all the content) & run a RAID0 / JBOD? What do you guys reccomend? Cheers
I gave up my home-brew 4x1TB RAID5 Nas, and moved to a much simpler system. I can't tell you what will work for you, but this works for me (I'm mac based by the way but the principles are the same) I kept the 7 1TB Samsung F1 Drives I had, but now use them individually rather than in an all in one RAID/NAS arrangement. I had a few other smaller drives to re-use in this re-gig. One went into an old USB 2.0 enclosure I had lying around and is attached to my airport extreme as a wi-fi drive. It's used for time-machine backups and a small repository for movies & TV. This can be accessed from everything including phones / iPads etc. My HTTP win7 box in the family room about 1.5TB of storage for a big chunk of TV & Movies. Not everything and no music but it'll do. My main photo & music library all fits and lives on a 2.5 USB 3.0 attached drive. 99% it's attached to my laptop but being USB I can move it if I ever need. The other 6 1TB drives are used on a more ad-hoc basis. One is a permanent backup of the 1TB media, another is another time-machine for sporadic 'belt and braces' backups. The others have various copies of data that came from the NAS, mainly TV Series, books etc. I use a dual bay USB 3.0 enclosure to access any 'NAS data' drive I need (Which is very rarely in fact). The shows / movies we're watching are either on the HTPC or wifi drive so there's no need for a NAS box. http://www.amazon.co.uk/IB-120StU3-Wh-Dual-Docking-Station-inch/dp/B0055BK7F2 With another drive dedicated to important photo backups, I've got at least three independent backups of the data I really care about. The replaceable stuff is on one or two drives. Win for me = Lots of backup options, Flexible levels of redundancy, no RAIDs to rebuild, no network configuration, no management issues, minimal noise & power, easy restores. Of course if I was starting again now I'd use bigger drives and make it even simpler. I certainly wouldn't look at running multiple NAS boxes.
Wow & I thought my backup solution was complicated! I like the idea of the ICYbox, especially as it sees the drives as two seperate drives, so it can replicate the drive. I prefer the idea of replication rather than mirroring. The only downside I can see is that it's USB & I'm all out of USB ports on my shuttle. I tend to do most of my stuff on the laptop, (The main PC hasn't been booted up for about 6 months). I'm thinking it may be an idea to just have 1 NAS running full time & then stick the 2 backup drives on a timer socket (or just schedule shutdown / startup times - if possible). The other NAS I might just turn on as & when the files are needed. Think I may just get 3 of these http://en.noontec.com/En/Products/MovieHome/N5.html.
