jackwilsonvideo :
Hey Andy,
Thanks for your quick response.
I am currently running my OS on a 960 EVO M.2 drive. I have an MX300 1TB SSD for general media. Then I have a 850 EVO 250GB SSD for my cache files.
I don't think I would need more than 12TB for active projects, come to think of it. I would offload completed projects to archive drives every year to clear up space.
I am often working with .R3D files so would hate for Adobe Premiere to bottle neck due to storage speeds. My budget for an immediate storage solution is around $1k. Do I risk the same hard drive failure rate with an all-inclusive system such as this? Would I have sufficient read/write speeds?
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1333894-REG/g_technology_0g05753_g_raid_removable_thunderbolt_3.html
I am glad to PayPal for a beer or coffee for some enlightenment. I am still new at this PC building stuff. Thanks!
Well, it's a difficult question. If you want to use a all-inclusive system, the only one I would recommend is something by ixsystems. It has ECC memory, and uses ZFS which has checksums and redundancy, so you just can't lose data (unless you lose the system by fire or theft). But, it's slow. The nature of ZFS is slow.
Maybe the best thing you can do is put the files you are working on to the SSD, then send them to that or a backup once done. Or, using a raid0 to work on the files, but then back them up immediately when done.
I don't understand why you have a 250GB SSD for cache files. What do you mean by that?
And how big are the biggest files you would work on?
The system you link has the same probability of failure as an internal system would, and is probably slower, despite the thunderbolt, because of sub-par controllers they put in those. The probability is actually lower, because there are only two disks (more disks in raid0 increase the risk of data loss in a non-linear way). You might consider RAID5, which, faster than RAID1, slower than RAID0, at least offers redundancy, which means if one drive fails you have at least a chance to rebuild the array.
You should archive daily, weekly, or, and I don't recommend, monthly. Yearly archiving is extremely dangerous. Imagine you lose an entire years worth of data! Or even a months. "Yeah, everything I worked on last month, I have to redo...". And often, everything seems fine until comes the time to backup. I can't tell you how often everything seemed to work great, and then I started making a backup, and in the middle of it some sectors on the disks that were silently bad showed up, corrupted files I hadn't used in a while, and I would have lost data if I didn't already have a backup.
A large factor is how much you value your data and can afford to lose it. An artist friend of mine had 15 TB of photos she took over the last decade, backep-up on dozens of drives she had stored in anti-plastic cases in her closet. Her apartment got broken into and they stole many things, including all the drives. She posted a $10k reward to get them back, anonymously, and without pressing charges. The data was worthless to the criminals, since most had been published (but not in the original raw format), and she owned the copyrights. But she never got them back. Just like that, a decade of work was lost. She was planning to compile them eventually to make a coffee table book. Now she can't.
So consider having a secondary backup which is in another location, preferably another city.
Also, transferring files to another system and deleting them isn't making a backup. Backup means at least two copies. So if you delete the files locally, you only have one copy, and no backup.
I'm happy to help further if you have other questions. I don't need any coffee or beer money, as I happen to be a rich m*-f*. If you can spare PayPal money, please consider donating to the FSF. They are doing good work.
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