Please help me store my data!

[mwahahaha]

Hi all,

I'm in a bit of a dilemma at the moment and could use some advice.

First off setup is all Mac, Mac Mini server and a few laptops in the house.

Currently the Mac mini has a 750GB firewire drive attached with my file store on. I used to have a second drive that I would sync periodically with the primary drive as an offline spare just incase!

Anyway that secondary drive is now my primary drive as the primary was dying. Now the fan bearing in the secondary is rattling away. I'm a bit sick of external drives breaking down all the time!

So do I go for a NAS? I like the look of the Netgear Readynas Duo the only thing that puts me off is it's maximum capacity of 1TB in raid1 and I'm pretty much there already. All the 4 drive enclosures are very expensive - around £500 which is more than I'd like to spend. Perhaps as HDD capacities increase Netgear may enable support for higher drives but that could be a gamble that doesn't pay off and I'm stuck with a nas that's not big enough...

I could get more USB drives - they never seem to last more than about a year before the enclosures give up which is a rather expensive habit!

I have looked at the Drobo but consider it too expensive and don't like the proprietary nature that will see me locked in or risk losing data.

I don't really need loads of fancy features just good file storage so I can put my iTunes library on (iTunes server feature not needed as I will use iTunes on the Mac Mini which is required so I can use the iPhone remote application) The rest is mainly movies/tv shows that stream to the laptops or xbox (Chipped with XBMC) so nice and easy (He says!)

So what do you all think - I keep changing my mind too much

 

[thiggins]

You might need to start thinking of whether you really need all the data available all the time. Terabyte drives are the workhorse drives right now (reports on 1.5 TB drive reliability and NAS support are mixed), so that puts you at 1 TB for RAID 1, 2 TB if you want to risk RAID 0.

If you want more, then you're looking at RAID 5, where space efficiency drops (3 1 TB drives (the minimum) in RAID 5 get you around 1.8TB of usable space, 4 drives get you around 2.8 TB.

You might consider just using single-drive NASes, like the Buffalo LinkStation that can do scheduled backups to each other. Sorta like RAID 1, but you have the added benefit of multiple power supplies and controllers.

Finally, if fans are your problem, remember there are fans in NASes, too, except for a very few models (QNAP TS-109 Pro, Buffalo LinkStation mini)

 

[mwahahaha]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the tips, good idea with the single drive NAS' to spread the risk of power supply/controller failure as that had been a fear of mine - what happens if the drives are fine but the nas housing itself or its power supply are broken!

At work we had a LaCie big disk (Not sure which but it was a 1TB multi drive affair) It's power supply went pop and it took nearly 1 month to get a replacement through - not just LaCie's fault also we had to get purchase orders etc signed for the PSU. Still that big disk had all my ghost images for client machines on which meant I had to build them all manually which taught me a lesson about what happens when a NAS itself goes pop.

I had a look through my file store last night and I currently have about 75GB of iTunes lossless rips and then about 500-600GB of TV rips, DVD-rips (h.264 encoded) and software backups. So I thought maybe I should have seperate solutions for music and then video/apps. I just don't want to have to resort to archiving data to DVD as they always end up getting lost/damaged.

I have to say that the Readynas NV+ would be great but just a bit too expensive for me at the moment...

I shall take a look at the QNAP and Linkstation you mention and have a think as to how I could adapt them to my setup...