2TB Data Drive Almost Full, Need Larger Data Drive. Help!

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golf nut

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Jan 23, 2010
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My current 2TB WD Black data drive is almost full, so I need to upgrade to a larger drive (along with upgrading to a larger backup drive as well). I think, rather than going to 4TB drives, I'm going to go to 6TB drives.

I'm also building a new house which will have cat 6 cabling in each room, routed to a central network hub in a closet. I'll also have a home wireless network. I'd like to have all my music, pictures, videos, etc. available to view/play on TV's in the house, or on any wireless devices connected to my home network. Should I, rather than just having an external 6TB backup drive, back up my data drive to something like a WD My Cloud EX2 which would have a pair of 6TB drives in Raid 1 (mirrored)? That would give me a backup (actually a pair of backups) and also possibly accomplish the goal of having my data available on my home network. I'd also have my data available "in the cloud" if I needed to access files away from my house.

Am I on the right track here? Or am I thinking about it all wrong? Would love to hear from the community on this.

Thanks in advance!
 
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hang-the-9
If you have that large NAS drive, you need to keep in mind that you'd want to have a copy of your data on another drive. RAID 1 is great if one drive fails, but not so great if you delete a bunch of files and need to restore them, or something happens and the data is corrupted. Then you'll just have two copies of the same missing or corrupted files. So if you are going with a 6tb NAS drive, you'd want another drive to hold your original or backup files.
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Rookie_MIB

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I would build something a little more expandable, but that's what I pretty much have. I put together my own NAS out of a chassis and some new guts. Currently have a RAID 5 setup of 5x2TB drives (8TB free) which provides some redundancy if a drive fails, it runs on a G3220/Gigabyte LGA1150 board and uses CentOS linux with Samba/CIFS for sharing.

It's a solid system, expandable, was cheaper than many commercial off the shelf NAS systems, and sits in my basement with a wired network. You can do much the same for very little cost if you have a computer sitting around and it doesn't even need to be new hardware. CentOS runs on pretty much any hardware from Core2Duo's on up easily, 1GB or more of RAM, just need a motherboard with sufficient SATA ports and a case/PSU which will handle the drives. Then just plug it into your wired network and you're good to go. Nice thing is it's very expandable.
 
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SuperSoph_WD

SuperSoph_WD

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Jul 30, 2014
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Hey there, golf nut!

Indeed, having a network-attached storage is a lot more convenient if you want to access your files from all the computers and devices that have access to the Internet. The WD My Cloud EX 2 incorporates two bays for your drives and massive data. Creating a RAID 1 is definitely the best alternative because it would save your data in case one of the HDDs fail. However, you should still consider doing an off-site backup of the NAS because having multiple copies of your files is the best way to prevent any potential data loss.

Another advantage to having a WD My Cloud NAS, instead of a desktop external HDD, are the WD's My Cloud apps - you can upload, access your documents from anywhere and transfer files from your public cloud accounts to My Cloud EX2 using the mobile app. You can also stream media files to your Smart TVs, media players, gaming consoles and other DLNA/UPnP devices.

If you think that the EX 2 might not be enough or want to create an even bigger RAID like @Rookie_MIB, you can check some other WD NAS alternatives as well.

Hope I was helpful. Good luck & Congrats on your new home! :)
SuperSoph_WD
 
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hang-the-9

hang-the-9

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If you have that large NAS drive, you need to keep in mind that you'd want to have a copy of your data on another drive. RAID 1 is great if one drive fails, but not so great if you delete a bunch of files and need to restore them, or something happens and the data is corrupted. Then you'll just have two copies of the same missing or corrupted files. So if you are going with a 6tb NAS drive, you'd want another drive to hold your original or backup files.
 
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Rookie_MIB

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Very true. Nothing is more fun than that 'oh sh*t' moment when you realize you deleted something you shouldn't have. That can however be accomplished by the very same NAS setup I mentioned. In that case, it can even be automated. What you would do:

Build the system.
Have one OS drive. two 6TB data (named for this example, data1 and data2) drives, set up as regular drives.
Share the data1 drive as the shared (visible) NAS drive.
Every few days (or whatever buffer time you want), you run an automated task (via 'cron') which syncs the two drives (via 'rsync') and backs up your files to data2.

Nice thing about this is you can set the task to happen once a day, twice a day, once a week, however you want. The other nice thing about the rsync utility is that it can be run only to copy either new files and files that have changed (it compares files). So if you modify a file deliberately, it copies the changed file when it's run. If you make a new file, it copies the new file. Files that exist already and are unchanged are left alone. This makes for a very quick backup.

Last thing - if it's run a certain way, it can either delete files that have been deleted from the main storage area (as in it creates a sync which is an exact mirror of the storage area) or it can leave files there (archive mode - where files which have been deleted from storage are still in the backup). This allows you to go back and get a mistakenly deleted file, or if you're sure you have nothing you need saved, you can do a true sync and clear out old files you don't need.

 
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