Slowly running out of HDD space I'm beginning to get the feeling a new RAID config may be in my best interest. As far as options, what would you guys suggest for image/media storage without sacrificing excessive CPU performance? I'm thinking a RAID tower setup in RAID5 with either four 320/500GB drives (7200RPM) drives but the cost has got me down a bit...any suggestions would be appreciated as I have no experience in this department. TIA. -Matt
At ast check, 640Gb is best Gb/£ rtio out at the moment, I'd go Samsung Spinpoint or WD (purely because of what people have told me about other brands)
Bigsharn, I'm in the $tates and while 640GB may be the biggest bang for the buck it still costs more than a 320/500GB HD in the long run. Besides, I don't need that much storage space (2TB is plenty...for now). Thanks though.
Do you need the mad speed of RAID5? If not, RAID 1 would do. That'd mean you could grab a cheaper RAID card.
I'm not sure, like I said I have no experience, but I've been told RAID5 is the way to go. The main use for the HDD's would be file storage, workflow would take place on my main drives.
RAID 1 offers no space for expansion, while RAID 5 does... RAID 5 has 2 benefits, Speed (which you'll bottleneck by the network) and expandibility, which you'll pray you had if you went RAID1
Thought about a Drobo? Higher initial cost, but it also doesn't bring about the mental anguish of having the manage a RAID (especially in the event of a drive failure).
What kinda budget you thinking? You want to have the storage network attached or in your main machine? RAID5 is nice but processor intensive so if you want to go that route, get a decent RAID controller that offloads the parity calcs. If I were you, I'd just build an uber-cheap PC from 2nd hand parts off here, grab some of those bad-ass WD 2TB drives and a decent RAID controller and RAID1 them. Then use either Freenas booting off a small USB drive or something or get a small HDD and follow Glider's linux fileserver guide. Now, you may be wondering why I said RAID1 in the last post. Well, if you get a decent RAID card, it'll offer RAID level migration so it can swap from raid1 to raid 5 without losing any data. So with 2x2TB drives in RID1 you'd get ~2TB usable space. Add in another 2TB drive at a later date and migrate to RAID5, you get ~4TB usable space.
my bad, just as an estimation (from your sig) 15Mb/photo, the 640Gb drive would only get you another 4000 pictures...I'm an amateur and take ~200 per shoot/outing (I'd assume you'd take more with more skill), hence recommendng it... To be completely honest I'd go JBOD, just for simplicity
Vers, check out www.Drobo.com Takes the headache out of the whole thing and makes a great redundant storage box. I just got one and I think I'll sleep better knowing that 600Gb of images are safer now rather then on various externals.
Mental anguish? we arent talking raid 0 here I have a 2.2 tb array at home setup with 400gig drives, if a drive fails, I pull out the failed one, put the new one in, wait 8 hours or whatever it takes for it to rebuild, and done. And if the original poster is putting this in a dedicated machine for storage only, there is no point in buying a card with an onboard processor , especially since a cheap one will limit you so youre talking about an $800+ card, or a $50-150
If you're looking for a 2TB raid and go down the raid 5 route (which sounds mighty similar to what I'm currently contemplating) then you'll probably want to factor in that you'll need an 8 port card to use 320/500GB discs, yet only a 4 port card is you use 1/1.5/2TB discs. Another thing to consider is power consumption, running 7x320GB or 5x500GB drives compared to 3x1TB drives, if it's going to be on 24/7 then the extra power overhead will soon add up to feeling it in the wallet. Might be worth doing the calcs? I think my final decision was to go with raid 5, 8 port card and 1TB drives, that way you get the flexibility of upgrading in the future, and whilst the initial costs might be slightly more, it will save you hassle and money in the long run. Bear in mind that long term is usually what you want to be thinking about as storage use will only get larger!
I'd also recommend starting out on an 8 port card, even if you're are only going to be using 4 drives. You're eventually going to need more storage and swapping over drive by drive is an immense pain, simply adding a drive or two to expand is so easy in comparison. You'll probably eventually upgrade to an 8 from a 4 port anyway, so just skip out the 4 port all together You can pick up some good deals on RAID cards on ebay. A dell Perc5i costs peanuts and is nearly identical to an Areca 1220 (they both use the IOP333, so its like comparing 2 graphics cards that both use a GTX280) yet costs a fraction of what the Areca costs.
Hey guys, thanks for all of the suggestions. I'm still undecided as to which route to take but Drobo, even though its an expensive option, seems like the way.
It is. No cards, no matching drives, hotswapping, FW800 with daisey chaining, USB2, email notification of failure. Easy to upgrade to 16Tb. Just pop in the drives (I started with 2 1Tbs), give it 5 min to format and boom, your golden. Pop in drives as needed, once you hit 4 drives, just replace the smallest one. It took me about 10 hours to move various Aperture libraries off of 4 external USB drives totaling about 600Gbs. All that is left now is a nice solid black box, and a 500Gb for time machine backups. TBH, beyond the geek factor, I fail to see the point of setting up a separate box with a RAID card for a small business/home office. Edit: So far my biggest issue is that the fan cycles off and on during heavy use. And since it's pretty quiet with Seagates I have in it; when the fan shuts off, I catch myself thinking it just shut down and I have a minor panic attack. but you get used to it.
It's more the price that puts me off, £100 for a raid card is all I'll need to spend over the cost of the drives as i have a spare low power rig just sitting around doing nothing. The £200 i'll have saved can then buy the drives too, so a fully working 2TB (3x 1TB drives) Raid5 set up for the price of the basic drobo box. i understand if you didn't already have the hardware though, however you can usually pick up systems that can be used as a file server for about £50. Also I'm going to be using the mine as a file server over a network, which to do with the drobo requires another £100+ piece of kit!
Yeah, while I quite liked the idea of the Drobo initially, I wanted NAS not a fancy RAID USB external drive enclosure. I wound up getting a Qnap TS409 Pro and it does the job nicely with 3x1TB drives in RAID5.
Not so. You can connect the Drobo to a computer on the network and arrange for it to be shared that way. Check out Mr GOO's post in Hardware. IIRC, that is how he shares his. For some of us, granted we're older and working from home, it's worth the extra money to have a simpler solution. For a long time I wanted to have a RAID 5 box on a network. But I have been busy with clients calling, a wife to keep happy, shoots booked, and just life moving the way it does; it's worth the extra dosh to just open a box, slap in drives, and back up. The fact that is FW800 and lets me daisy chain my other FW drives, that is just cheesecake.
