Centrealized Storage

[shenberry]

I have a bunch of computers all with rip dvd and music and more than 5tb all together.
I want a system where I can store all these things locally and view them from what ever computer is on my network. I have no problem building a computer, but I am not sure of what technology to go with. NAS, File Server, SAN, etc.

As well what OS will I need to buy all of my drives are from XP and later and stored as NTFS. I don't want to rip all my dvds all over again to get this system working. As well I don't want to buy another Microsoft product if I don't have to.

This will be my first personal experience with RAID and from my understanding these drives get really hot under these conditions, but I really don't want to loose information so what is the best RAID to go with and how hard is it to setup.

So Hardware, Operating System, Raid Configuration to store 5tbs of media, documents, pictures, audio and video that can be accessed from XP, Vista, 7 and Ubuntu.

Thanks.

 

[sminlal]

I can't answer everything, but I'd suggest:

- Use "green" drives to keep things cool.

- Don't forget a backup strategy. RAID is not backup - it's not worth diddly squat when your files get corrupted or when someone breaks into your home and steals the equipment.

 

[shenberry]

Thanks for the start on Green/Eco hard drives, not sure if they use that for 2tb drives.
Damn I thought I could do without a backup with a correct raid type. Gosh a five to eight terabyte backup might need to come first before I even start the transition.

 

[sminlal]

WD, Seagate and probably the other drive manufacturers as well offer 2TB green drives. WD literally calls them "Green", while Seagate uses the term "LP" (for "Low Power").

 

[shenberry]

Thanks for the info, still wondering if anyone can help me with the route to take on the storage and backup. Tape Drives are expensive, wondering if I could use flash drives as a logical backup. I won't be taking them anywhere they would just stay in a cool place.

 

[sminlal]

If you think tape drives are expensive, then wait till you price out 5TB of flash memory....

Disk drives are the cheapest, fastest and most convenient media for backup. I use a bare USB 3.0 drive dock so that I don't have to pay for an external enclosure for every drive.

 

[shenberry]

Not sure if you are referring to these, http://aluratek.com/usb-3-0-superspeed-sata-hard-drive-docking-enclosure,
but how will I backup 5tbs with this one machine? Backing Up is not my thing. It might be cheaper to by double the hard drives, but than I want need a raid system. The system I plan on building will be from 5 to 8 tb. The biggest drive I can get is 2tb, so I would need potentially 4 of them, how would I be able to backup those 8tb form one computer to multiple hard drives using that docking station? They might have some software, but I wouldn't want to make out the first couple of drives and leave little to no space on the last one. I would like even for my backup to room after all no hard drive like to be maxed out.

 

[sminlal]

Yep, that's the type of docking station I was referring to.

There simply isn't any single media available, including tape, that can handle 5-8 TB of data. Whatever backup solution you use will have to deal with multiple media.

You can buy a backup program that allows backups to span multiple backup volumes, or you can simply plug in each disk in turn and copy 2TB worth of data to it. You just need a scheme for organizing the files so you know which backup disk has what files on it. You could do it alphabetically, by date, by category, or whatever makes sense to you.

I've gotta believe that with that volume of data most of it is static and doesn't change very much. So you don't need to be backing it up all the time. The tough part is making the first backup - but it's not that bad. You can plug in one backup drive, start a copy, and let it run overnight. Repeat for 2 or 3 more nights and you're done.

 

[shenberry]

Yea, I will need a program that will check for updates of new date so I want have the same files on two discs. Thanks for the backup choice, now what to do about the file server?