External HDD Storage

[jiarby]

Any of you guys use big external drive arrays for backups/file storage?

I picked up two great 5-bay hot swapable eSata RAID enclosures. Seriously well made, all aluminum & steel. No plastic anywhere! Bought from a video editing company that went out of business.

They hold up to 5 2Tb HDDs (yep, thats 10TB !).

So, how would you configure the 5 drives?
- One giant JBOD, 10tb Volume??
- As an 8TB RAID 5?
- As a 6TB RAID 5 with a hot spare?
- As a 4TB RAID-10 with a hot spare?
- Just as external drive, no raid?

I guess I could use both enclosures (was going to sell one on CL/eBay) and create a 10TB Raid-10

How long do you think a 10tb Raid rebuild would take! ? <GASP>

 

[OldPaint]

well you got plenty of storage. i doubt your computer h/d is anywhere near as large. all you need to backup are FILES.........not the whole h/d. i do this with a single external drive with a 160 gig h/d.

 

[noregrets]

We use a NAS with two 2TB disks set up on a mirrored raid. To me this is the safest option as my data is still all good if one of the drives fails

 

[jiarby]

Well... I have alot of storage:
AND.. I want to be able to recover from any HDD failure on any computer in less than 1/2 hour, so I do alot of drive imaging backups which take up alot of storage space. I install replacement HDD, then pop in a bootable memory stick loaded with Acronis software and restore the backup image of any drive on any computer I have. I keep a backup of every thing offsite as well in case of a fire here.

Just in my design PC:
1. O/S Drive: 2x Raid-0 150gb WD Raptors makes a 300gb System partition
2. Customer Files: 500gb WD 7200rpm (Mirrored (RAID-1) to an identical drive)
3. Website Files, Photos, Music: 500gb WD 7200rpm
4. Application Installers: 640gb WD Black 7200rpm. CD & DVD disk images of applications & programs, downloaded files, service packs, or anything that has been installed.
5. Digital Art & Fonts: 640gb WD Black 7200rpm: Clipart collections, stock art, fonts, etc...

I have a separate single drive enclosure (Rosewill, eSata) with a 2TB Hitachi that I currently use for backups. It is full!

I also have:
1. An XP machine that controls our laser engraver. (80gb HDD)
2. An XP machine that is for the sublimation printer. (80gb HDD)
3. An XP machine for Accounting/Quickbooks - The wife's primary home PC (80gb)
4. An XP RIP PC for my Onyx Production House... my OLD design PC. 300gb System drive & a 300gb Data drive (for RIPPED EPS files).

I make Weekly image file backups of my O/S drive. Then I do daily differntial backups until the next weekly one.
I make Daily image file backups of the customer files drive. I keep the last 7 daily images.
I make Monthly image file backups of the other data drives (they do not change as much and/or contain data that is easy to replace.

Then I also store image files of all the other computers on the network.

So:
300gb System
+500gb customer files
+500gb photos & music
+640gb applications
+640gb clipart & fonts
-------
2.5TB total in design PC. I average about 40-60% utilization
Then add in the 3 other 80gb drives and the 500gb in the RIP and I am at 3TB of running hard drives.

My 2TB external is MAXED out just in backup files, so I bought this 5-drive box.

I know that 10TB sounds ridiculous, but if I run my backup schema as I designed it I can have 6TB just in backup files over the course of a month... then they start rolling and overwriting the older ones.

Thank goodness I am not into videos and movies! THAT is where regular people start chewing up drive storage. It doesn't take too many 25-50gb blue ray movies to fill up a hard drive!

 

[Craig Sjoquist]

Thats a impressive amount of external HD geez how many mbs does a wrap take ??

 

[GAC05]

Couldn't you just back up all that stuff to a single iPad2?

wayne k
guam usa

 

[Custom_Grafx]

I just use a 500gb external and do incremental back ups every couple of days.

My system is due for an update soon - maybe within the next 6 months or so, or by end of year I guess.

I'm thinking about going with drobo storage but not sure - have you had any experience with this system? I don't - but have heard about it here and there and it looks like a good system.

I was also recommended by my computer guy, to consider using an SSD for my o/s and programs - ghost it just in case (he reckons the SSD will last me at least 4-5 years - and I usually upgrade in about 3 years, so he reckons it should be alright) - then he suggested setting up a RAID for my data. He thinks the drobo thing is a waste of money - and that it's just a fancy name for RAID... I dunno.

My PC has screwed me only once thus far. For a long time a few of my mates told me I was worrying too much and that nothing would happen and that I shouldn't be backing up so much. If you've been through losing your PC, you'll know that even if it just saves you once - you can never do enough to back up your data. The thought of losing every single file scares the bejesus outta me.

 

[jiarby]

I think a drobo is a brand name for a retail external drive system. A drobo equivalent to my unit costs $600

I considered an SSD, but chose the Raid-0 raptors instead, mostly because of the expense. I got these 150gb Raptors for about $125, and an equivilant SSD (256mb) is still over $400.

Thats a impressive amount of external HD geez how many mbs does a wrap take ??

I dunnow... but I do have a few hundred gigs of customer files.. about 4-5 years worth. I think the biggest single file we ever got from a customer was a 300dpi jpg for a 4x8 banner. Seems like it was over 1gb. With Corel, if you schlep a couple shadows and a transparency into a big banner layout and accidentally leave the "render bitmaps at ___
dpi" set to 1200 because you just finished a business card design then get ready for a huge honking file!

I like my eSata (compared to a NAS solution) because of the 3Gbps speed. USB is 480mb, and theoretical max for a NAS is 1Gbps.. real world throughput for a NAS is probably between 100mbps-750mbps, depending on filesize. Even so, I was thinking of making a single drive NAS just to have common file sharing space. I have an old single drive SCSI enclosure that I could convert to a SATA NAS... just need to gut all the SCSI stuff and add in an RJ45/SATA Bridgeboard

 

[ncpdfsb]

drobo garbage, poor chipsets. mirror those drives and just incremental backup to save on drive failure. even with the case fan your going to have a heat problem. raid 5 is going to take a long time (raid 5 striped across 10 tb) use a fan blowing on that box to dissipate heat if you go that way. i have a sans digital setup just mirrored, i save data in increments based on failure. if a drive fails i will replace (hot swap) with new mirror then replace the second drive. the old drive gets archived. have 2tb/1tb usable. fits my needs.

 

[jiarby]

there is nowhere to add a fan, the one in there seems to be good, ProMAX use the best parts they could. I have 5 drives in it now, all between 91°F and 96°F

 

[round man]

I would suggest a raid 10 with four of the drives. that gives you the options of mirroring and striping for best performance and redundancy for security.

 

[jiarby]

Thx, iJack (one i)