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Hard drive in RAID - For storage purposes
So a family member of mine is looking for new hard drives to store raw photos, videos etc.So the size of it has to be pretty big.
It will be used more as a storage than an active hard drive, a place where you can dump things onto and know that they are safe.
He also wants it to have a wifi connection.
SSD and high storage volumes becomes expensive really fast, and if he mostly needs it for just storage is it worth going the extra mile for multiple SSDs?
He is also on mac. But from my understanding you can format the HDD to understand both Mac and windows.
He also wants this to be portable, maybe four slots to insert hard drives.
So I wonder if anyone can come with some tips on what to look for.
The target area of storage space is 6TB. So you get that going full on SSD on that is pretty expensive.
The aim is to run a double raid so he has less chance of loosing the data.
Having a hard drive case that you can plug and play into your wifi router would be a big plus.
Thanks for any tips and advice.
Sorry if this post came out really disorganized:P
Comments
What are you looking for is a small NAS. You could go for a 2 bay NAS with 2x6TB HDD's or a 4 Bay NAS with 3x2TB HDD's.
The benefit of the 4 bay is you could throw in an extra 2TB drive at any time.
With the NAS you can connect it to your home network and share files to MAC's or Windows PC's.
Using SSD's with bump up the price considerably for no extra benefit if all you want is long term storage.
I'm not sure why you'd want WiFi when you can just get a NAS, set it next to your router, and plug it in. I was going to ask if you needed high performance from the storage, but if you're considering accessing it over WiFi, the answer to that is an emphatic "no".
I'm sure that it's possible to get a 4-bay NAS with RAID 5 capabilities. I'm not so sure that you'd like the price tag on it.
This seems like the sort of thing where Ridelynn is the local expert.
I agree with xcessive and Quizzical.
Look at getting a 4 Bay NAS like Synology (There are other products, I just happen to have a synology).
Plug it into the router. It can easily be setup to have external internet access and comes with Apps for Iphone and such to access Photos, Videos, etc.
When you say Double Raid im going to assume you mean something like Raid 6. You'll take a performance hit depending on the Raid, but honestly i'd just let most NASs today handle the raid/redundancy.
Is there a price your looking at not going over? That will be what is going to limit your family member on all his needs.
Truth be told, I have not heard the term NAS before;) Please dont get hung up on the wifi thing. If I/we can get something to plug straight into a network, great. Then the network takes care of the rest.
What I am more interested in is what hardware to go for. Are there cases that stand out as superior? Is there any benefit in running a hybrid SSD/HDD?
USB 3.0?
I am pretty much clueless on this front, and any advice that might help thanks. Again, I am not getting this for myself, I am simple looking for advice that I can share.
NAS = Network Attached Storage
It is what the name says it is.
Basically, you want ordinary hard drives, not SSDs or the ridiculous "hybrid" drives (whose "hybrid" capabilities would probably be completely broken by the NAS, anyway).
Western Digital says their "Red" hard drives are ideal for a NAS. Seagate is less subtle about the marketing, selling a "NAS HDD". I don't know if there's any engineering that makes the drives better for a NAS or if it's pure marketing.
I don't think you are looking for a double RAID array.
A double RAID array, portability, economy and hot swapping do not mix. One consists of 2 RAID controllers with multiple storage devices attached to each controller. Those controllers might be in a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device or may be attached to a server or workstation. This is neither cheap, nor portable.
Especially for just 6 TB of storage.
RAID 0 has no redundancy. If one drive fails the array fails. Everything is lost.
RAID 1 is redundant and can be done with 2 drives. It requires drives in multiples of 2. It requires drives with twice the desired storage capacity. You want 6 TB then you need two 6 TB drives.This is good for a home or small office setup. Depending on the importance of the data you would still want a way to backup data. RAID 1 is no more capable of discovering read/write corruption errors than a single drive.
RAID 5 is redundant, requires an additional drive to RAID 1 of equal storage capacity and because of that and the controller is capable of discovering and correcting read/write corruption errors. RAID 5 is usually SCSI based not IDE/PATA/SATA. Hot swapping can be done on a RAID 5 array but it is only done when individual drives need to be replaced not when different data sets need to be exchanged.
A NAS device that can be set up as a RAID 1 array that consists of 2 or 4 drives is probably what you are looking for. Your technical proficiency and abilities will determine whether a consumer grade or professional grade NAS davice will fit your needs. A consumer grade NAS with 6 -8 TB will start around $300 - $400.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401086,00.asp
Connection: Your choices are wired or wireless. If you go with wireless, it is likely to be a slower transfer rate. This isn't a problem when you have a lot of time, or if you aren't transferring much at once. If you're going to be moving 1+ GB at a time, you need a wired connection.
Storage: Solutions range from single-drive systems to larger NAS systems. If you want it to be portable, then you get fewer drives in the system. If you want it to be portable and have 6TB of storage, then your drives are going to be very expensive.
Fault Tolerance: Some portable systems offer a RAID 0 or 1 setup. If a drive dies in a RAID 0, you lose all of your data. If you don't want to lose data, you need a fault-tolerant RAID setup, and that means you can't have something portable. One common RAID setup used in servers is RAID 1+0, which is a combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0. Two drives are striped for read/write speed increase and the other two mirror them for fault tolerance. It can have one drive fail and be fine. If the second drive fails, it will be fine as long as it isn't the mirror of the first.
Other Features: Some systems offer other useful features. One is remote access. This reduces the need for portability because you can access your files from anywhere. This is highly dependent on your home internet connection speed and ISP limitations, though.
Some Choices:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178435
~$90 - The one above is a 2.5" laptop drive with a USB connection. It is only 2TB, but fits your requirement for portability best. There is no fault tolerance for failing drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152424
~$230 - This one fits your storage requirement for 6TB and is somewhat portable. It requires power from a wall outlet. It has minimal features and no fault tolerance.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822165609
~$340 - This is an entry-level RAID system. It supports two 3TB drives. If you need fault-tolerance, you get 3TB of capacity. I'm not sure if you can put your own drives in the system or not. My guess is the controller is pre-configured to use a maximum capacity of 3TB drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Desktop-NAS/SubCategory/ID-124
NAS - The price varies a lot on these, depending on capacity selected and RAID requriements. I suggest going with a disk-less system so you can choose your own drives. A 6TB capacity system is going to be on the high-end of the pricing if you choose a system which includes drives.
Being on a Mac doesn't really change anything for this discussion - fortunately.
Most routers have a USB port - you can plug almost any external USB hard drive into them, and the router will share them over the network - making a essentially a poor man's NAS. If nothing else - plug a thumb drive in and play with it and see if it's workable for you.
There's also cloud solutions like Dropbox, iCloud, etc. Depending on how much data we are talking about they may or may not be an option - but it's available.
Past that, there are the full blown NAS boxes. They come empty (just the box, add your own hard drive), or pre-loaded with hard drives (tend to be a bit more expensive than DIY, and you don't get to select the make/model of the drive). These come in pretty much any size from 1-Bay all the way up to HOLYCRAPTHATSALOTOFHARDDRIVES bays.
I don't recommend the 2-bay options. The reason being - you get several options on how to set up your drives: You can have every drive show up as a separate drive, you can RAID them in various fashions (RAID0/1/5/6/10/JBOD/etc). JBOD is "Just a bunch of disks" - and it basically just adds up all your hard drives in under one common share point - no speed benefit, no reliability, but your hard drives don't have to be matching sets or capacities either - it's extremely basic, but can be convenient if you have a lot of smaller drives and want to use them as one big drive.
If you go with a 2-bay, your pretty much limited to two separate disks (a bit inconvenient), JBOD (essentially the same thing as RAID-0 in this case), RAID-0, or RAID-1. JBOD and RAID-0, if either hard drive has problems, you lose everything. RAID-1, you gain no additional hard drive space, so if storage space is your concern, you aren't gaining anything over a single-disk solution (some reliability, I admit, but that's a different concern and discussion).
4-Bay (and up, going past 4 is probably overkill for most people) - that opens a lot of doors... RAID5 will combine them all with a pretty small hit to your total capacity and provide some measure of redundancy. RAID10 gives you the best of RAID1 and RAID0 combined, you won't get as much space as RAID5, but you get some additional safety and speed with it.
But start with the USB port on the router - see how that goes. That gets your feet wet with NAS as well. Then look from there.
NASes - I've had bad experiences with Western Digital MyBook, they look like a nice easy solution but I RMAed 3 out of 3 and ended up just ebaying the final RMA without even taking it out of the box.
I've had very good luck with Synology - easy to use, works well, built well. I've had decent luck with QNAP - very similar to Synology, but I've had a few quirks with QNAP from time to time (TimeMachine backups breaking between software updates, AFP file shares being intermittent, etc). I had a 2-bay Netgear for a short while, and it was nearly identical to the QNAP - not a bad unit, few quirks from time to time, but overall decent. I don't have any experience with Theacus or Buffalo.
There are some firmware differences in how the drives run, but I'm not convinced that it provides a meaningful difference in their error rates, lifespan, or performance.
For NAS purposes - my recommendation is to get the least expensive drive you can with a suitable warranty period (at least 3 years). Some people pay a lot more for enterprise-level drives, but you could buy 2 cheap consumer drives for the same price, and if your NAS has any level of redundancy, you aren't going to see a 100% increase in failure rates over a reasonable time span (3-5 years) to make the financials work out so that the enterprise drives become a meaningful investment. At least for NAS purposes.
Now that's an extreme case - WD Reds aren't enterprise class, and they don't carry a huge premium - they are usually only $10-20 more than your typical budget drive (usually a WD Green or Blue or some similar Seagate/HGST model). Maybe that's not so much price difference that you aren't williing to try it and see -- I did once. But I haven't done it since, I haven't seen any marked difference in any meaningful metric, and by the time you buy 4+ HDs, that $10-20 starts to add up quickly.
Just my experience and opinion there. I buy whatever is on sale that day now, and I do tend to prefer HGST or WD over Seagate (HGST tends to win out on most reliability studies and I've yet to have one fail on me -- knock on wood, and WD has an excellent RMA service, it's just a shame I've had to use it as often as I have).
SSD and high storage volumes becomes expensive really fast, and if he mostly needs it for just storage is it worth going the extra mile for multiple SSDs?
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