1TB Redundancy on a budget – How?

[aistouth]

Currently I have a TB of 3D data on some internal and external hard drives. Last week one of the drives spectacularly failed, and all the irreplaceable data contained within was permanently lost.

In an effort to avoid such a situation again I have been researching ways for an independent artist on a low budget to achieve sufficient data redundancy so that if one drive fails no data is lost and a new drive can be purchased to replace the dead one without much hassle.

After reading through the different articles on RAID arrays (which mostly seemed like gibberish to me as it’s completely out of my specialty) I concluded that the only option that I understood enough to implement myself would be to just buy five additional hard drives hand copy the files so I’d have a manual RAID 1 array of sorts.

However this solution is totally unacceptable for obvious reasons and I’m way over my head in technical jargon (even after reading TFM).

Ideally I’d want to have enough redundancy/parity data so that if one drive fails no data is, lost be able to tell when a drive is failing easily, and not have to spend more than one to two thousand or so dollars.

Browsing through the forum here after being referred by a client reveals that there are some truly knowledgeable professionals graciously offering advice, and I would deeply appreciate any insights or pointers you might have to share.

Thank you.

Sincerely Yours,
AiStouth

 

[JohnWeldt]

I would buy several drives (4+) and a RAID card. Buy a spare if you can afford them as if one fails you will have to replace it until the RMA goes through. RAID is not that hard to work with, just read the manual and ask questions.

4x 320GB drives on raid 5 should be close to 1TB. At about $100 a pop you could get 5 and have one for backup. Or 5 on the RAID or …

Having the same type of drives is a safe bet. In the long run and drives are being remodelled every other day. I would buy all you need now.

Use RAID5 for some redundancy and have fun.

Or buy a third party system like the ones reviewed by toms.

 

[Fox_granit]

Use RAID5. With the bit parity, you can reconstruct the lost drive. It keeps the cost down becuase you don't have to backup each individual HD and allows for data recovery. Look into it. You'll have the preformance of a stripe RAID and the reliability of a mirror RAID.

 

[Wgfalcon]

this might work although i've only limited experience with nas setups

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822165012

 

[SHv2]

You could always do what I did and buy 4x 400GB Western Digital Drives and hook them up in raid 5. Gives you 1.1 TB after formatting. These drives may cost $170 but are the nicer enterprise drives that come with a 5 year warranty, definitely a plus.

 

[lcdguy]

sounds like what you want is a Raid 5 Array. There a number of solutions out there that won't break the bank, as it were. I am personally looking at getting something like this. but what you need to keep in mind with Raid 5 is you essentiall lose 1 drive to parity so 4x250GB is really only 750GB of space in RAID 5.

so if you need the 1TB just use bigger drives.

The box i am looking at is a storage system made by intel it's the lower end of their product line (around 800 bucks canadian for the case) then you just add 4 drives to the system. it's max capacity is 2 TB. The drives are hot swapable and it has dual gigabit ethernet, a 400MHZ CPU, 256Mb Ram 32MB NVRAM.

the other thing to keep in mind is to make sure your raid controller is HARDWARE based not software based, since rebuilding an array would literally take for ever on software if it did ever finish.

I hope this helps.

Ciao.

 

[Frank_M]

4x 320GB drives on raid 5 should be close to 1TB.

Around 960GB.

For your situation, RAID 5 sounds like the way to go. If you put n drives together in RAID 5, you get the storage of n-1, and if one of them fails, you can recover all data, take out the bad drive and put in a new one.

 

[lcdguy]

this might work although i've only limited experience with nas setups

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822165012

thats a little expensive, get this one

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822106001

thats the one i am getting, it's just more because i am in canada

 

[aistouth]

I have spent a long time going over the different NAS solutions to create a 1TB RAID 5 and finally decided on the ReadyNAS NV.

http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS%20NV

If you have any experience with this particular product or the company Infrant I'd love to hear about it. From what I could pull up online, the ReadyNAS NV will do all I want and more.


I plan on purchasing it through the reseller Eaegis.com for $638 unless I can find a better deal somewhere else. They offer free shipping which is a plus. I wasn't able to find the ReadyNAS NV through NewEgg for some reason. The hard drives that Eaegis sells are outrageously marked up. Someone else on the forum had in the past purchased the same unit through Eaegis though.

http://www.eaegis.com/Browse_Item_Details.asp/Item_ID/726601/categ_id/118/parent_ids/64,118/Name/Infrant_Technologies_ReadyNAS_NV_No_Pre-installed_Hard_Disks_w__4_Empty_Disk_Trays_Supports_X-RAID_and_RAID_0__1__5_256MB_Memory_Silver_(FREE_SHIPPING)


As for the four drives to go into the ReadyNAS NV, I selected the

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s drive through newegg.com for $94.99 as others here have mentioned it does well in a RAID plus it seems to have a great dollar/GB ratio with a five year warrantee.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140


$638(ReadyNAS NV) + 4x$95(Seagate Barracuda) = $1,018 total for 1,280GB of space (894GB actual RAID5)


The one thing I worry about is that the ReadyNAS and other NAS units only seem to be warranted for a year or so (I think? They don’t clearly say on their webpage which is scary…). With a $638 dollar investment in the NAS unit alone, I'd like a much longer warrantee. If it breaks in 13 months do they expect me to buy a new one at 650 dollars?

This is all completely new to me but after doing all this research I defiantly have a better understanding. Money is extremely tight right now and I’d hate to over spend if there are better solutions I’m ignorant of. Any insights you have to offer will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again for your kind and helpful advice.

Sincerely Yours,
AiStouth