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Personally, I'm looking into purchasing a low-end solution for my data. I used optical media in the past but the failure rate was just too high (media could be read in some drives but not on others). I skipped Blu-Ray for that reason. Recently, I've reacquired love for HDDs. Mechanical problems notwithstanding there are simply no other solutions that offer the bang for buck that hard drives offer. I'm thinking of purchasing a DAS device, namely a 4 or 5 drive, eSATA drive enclosure capable of RAID 5. I've been looking and decided on two possible candidates. The first one is: http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/4-bay-raid-enclosure-quad-efut5r.htm The second is: http://www.superwarehouse.com/Buffalo_DriveStation_Quattro_TurboUSB_4_TB_Hard_Drive_Array/HD-QS4.0TSU2_R5/p/1516484 Personally, I don't see much differences aside from cosmetic ones. They can both do what I would like them to do which is RAID 5 and have eSATA connectivity. The one feature I don't like on both enclosures (and this is after contacting their sales personnel) is that RAID configuration is done either through software or directly on the unit, there is no RAID controller BIOS like on PERC or 3ware controllers to do things manually. This is bad because if more than one drive fails you might need to fiddle with the array to try and recover it (forcing online one of the drives to rebuild the other one, for example). Can any storagoons chime in favor or against these enclosures? Should I just scrap the idea and put my own file server (would prefer an option that required little to no maintenance)?
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Jul 22, 2010 15:18
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I'm considering buying a Drobo FS or a ReadyNAS NVX Pioneer. Its not going to be used for business purposes, I'm just running out of space too quickly and adding drives piecemeal just completes backing it up. I thought a nice NAS with RAID 5 could help me with this. Before I commit to buying an NAS I have some questions that I haven't been able to find the answers for anywhere else. 1) How important is to use Enterprise Hard Drives on the NAS? I'm not rich and would like to keep the price as low as possible while not setting myself for failure (IE no Fujitsu or Hitachi Deathstar drives). 2) Premade NAS or DIY? I'm not afraid of a little DIY as I build my own systems. Will building my own be cheaper than buying a premade? The only plus I see in doing home brew is that I could choose whether I wanted to use RAID Z or something more exotic. I'm completely clueless regarding Unix, Solaris and such. I have used RHEL 4 and 5 at work and Ubuntu at home. Any help will be appreciated.
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Oct 12, 2010 15:26
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:Why would you buy the 6 year-old NVX instead of the brand new (and slightly cheaper) ReadyNAS Ultra? Hurr. Thats what I get for not doing enough research. The Ready NAS Ultra 4 or 6 seem nice. X-RAID2 is basically all I need for a no-nonsense, no complications setup. Thanks for the heads up! necrobobsledder posted:There's a lot of us in this thread that know the differences well and still use green drives for home setups. The price premium is really not worth it for almost every home storage use case. I've been using Green drives since they came out in my software RAID setups and they've been more than fine. It's just that there's issues when using hardware RAID controllers that try to do a bunch of other crap that they present problems. Funny, I get the impression among home RAID using folks that more data has been lost due to RAID complications than drive failure. Interesting. Software RAID is not as much of a problem as Hardware RAID. I'm not too concerned by performance as the NAS will be used to store a crap load of data that will be accessed sporadically. Perhaps as a movie and music store too. My 1.5 TB and 1 TB drives are not cutting the mustard. Could I impose on you a little more and ask you to elaborate a bit about what causes the drives to fail in hardware arrays and how to prevent that in software RAID? I recall reading a few posts at the beginning regarding head cycles or some such that are overworked by the RAID controller which causes them to fail even though the platters themselves are probably fine. Guys you have been more helpful than the storage support department at work (major OEM). 
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Oct 12, 2010 20:23
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necrobobsledder posted:There's two properties of low power drives in the industry that are of interest to those running RAID setups. The aggressive head parking behavior resulting in a likely shortened lifecycle due to just plain mechanical wear is one, and the TLER / timeout behavior is the other. These are not a problem in any drive line elsewhere. Otherwise, the behaviors and features are down to warranty, certain electro-mechanical longevity, and 4k / 512b sector size issues (this is relevant in storage systems overall). I don't have plat so I can't PM you but I'm interested. At that price I could finally have a suitable home for the MET-Art girls.
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Oct 14, 2010 04:52
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I have a question regarding NAS enclosures. I currently have a Thecus N4100 Pro enclosure and I'm getting worried about drive lifetime. In the NAS specs it claims that the disks shouldn't have a temperature above 40C for optimal operation. When checking the drive temperature in the NAS interface, most of them are closer to 50C than 40. One of the drives recently died (not detectable) and while the rest of the drives seem to be doing fine, I'm worried that the high temps might kill the rest of the drives. The drives are 2TB WDEADS20 in RAID 5. I just updated to the latest firmware which claims to keep the fan at max speed at all times. The room where the NAS is usually remains at 28C to 30C. Should I be worried about the high temperatures? The data is not mission-critical but I would be pretty bummed to lose it (I keep the enclosure off while I wait for the replacement drive to arrive.
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Jan 20, 2012 12:53
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BnT posted:That's 82F to 86F for us yanks. Anything you can do about that? If it's in a server room can you move it to a lower position? Aside from that, keep the fans clean and make backups. Well I could leave the AC running but that would skyrocket my power bill. Its my room and I'm in the tropics so ambient temps are in that range. Would shutting the NAS down except while I'm using it be a better idea?
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Jan 20, 2012 20:18
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