Adding NAS / RAID 1

tbmax57

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Hello,
I have a home network with about 5 computers. It included an HP mdeia drive that recently died. The seagate disk is corrupted and is being recovered at great expense. I would like to replace it with another NAS and set it up with RAID 1 so that if one disk crashes I have a good one. I would like 1-2 TB of space. Any suggestions on boxes. I thought I liked the WD Sharespace, but it seems to have a lot of negative reviews.

Thanks
 

gtvr

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No info on NAS devices, but as far as RAID 1 I'm going to quote myself from another thread I just posted:

"The best way I've come up with to explain RAID 1 is, it is a potential uptime enhancer. That is, if one drive in the array dies, you don't have to lose uptime while you restore from a backup. If that's worth the cost of an extra HD for you, then go for it. It does NOT replace backup in any way shape or form. "

In other words, don't make a RAID 1 the only copy of your data. RAID 1 helps for drive failure over a single drive.
 

tbmax57

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That is the failure that I am trying to protect against, drive failure of a single drive. The odds of two drives failing at the same time would be seem to be quite small unless it was a virus or corrupt file that was written to both. That would not be a hardware failure. I am not so concerned about that. I am no expert on RAID configurations, but RAID 1 seems like the best for protection from the failure of a single drive. Do you think another RAID configuration is better? or do you think it is better to not mirror in a NAS but set up a backup routine from one drive to the next on a periodic basis. That would reduce the odds of corrupting both at once with a virus, but would not guarantee that the latest data would always be backed up.

 

gtvr

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raid 1 does what you describe. 2 drives failing - the risk is pretty low. But as you said, viruses, power surges, theft, fire, etc - these are all risks to data. RAID 1 protects you against disk failure, which is good, but not sufficient for everything.

Even without raid, with a good backup you wouldn't be sending your disk out for expensive recovery. That's all I'm saying.
 

tbmax57

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There are a lot of external hard drives that can be used to back up a computer and a NAS can be used to backup all my computers. For example I could use my Norton software and tell it to back up to the NAS. How would I back up the NAS? I know it has USB ports that could connect to an external hard drive. I could use a second NAS. But it would seem that either way I would have to manually copy the data. What I would really like is one device that holds multiple drives. One drive would be my NAS storage for common files and the other disk would be for backups of the first disk and my computers. Then I would like to figure out how to automate the backup so I don't forget to do it. Any thoughts?

 

gtvr

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There is backup software that can run on a schedule (as long as the PC is on).

One thing to do though is maybe back up from your PC to a CD-R or DVD-R, and get it off of the computer. THAT will give you great redundancy, esp. if you can move it out of your house (parents, friend, etc). Other than that, your strategy sounds good. The more places your data is, the merrier.
 

tjude

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I would recommend a NAS with mirroring only. RAID isn't going to help much, and failures due to system mis-writes and viruses will be replicated to whatever. Offsite backup is good, but the most frequent failure mode by FAR will be drive failure, and a mirrored NAS server will reduce that risk to almost zero.

So... Get a mirrored NAS server and periodically back it up to offline media (web backup services) and incrementally automatically backup to free web storage. You could do better, but only at massive incremental cost, in terms of both time and equipment.
 

tbmax57

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TJude, by mirroring, I presume that you are referring to RAID 1? I had seen a Western Digital NAS that had 4 x 1Gb drives, but didn't get great reviews. I am thinking about something like Synology, but I have never heard of them and am a little nervous that somehow I won't get it to work. I am looking at a relatively simple setup of a 2 drive unit that will RAID 1 with 2 x 2Gb drives.