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So i'm in a bit of a pickle. I work for a really small tv station (we only have 4 employees). Dealing with video, we can quickly create many many gigabytes of data. Right now we have a 2tb server storing all of our content, but we have quickly filled that up. I'd like to build something in the 5 to 8 terabyte range to accommodate our future storage needs, but am a bit flummoxed at the variety of options infront of me. As I see here are the routes I can go: - Buy a prebuilt NAS and fill it with drives - Build a hardware raid box with an areca card or something, fill it with 8 1tb drives using raid-6 for 6tb of storage - Buy a prebuilt server from HP or something for a ridiculous cost - Build a box using software raid (can software raid even be done on 8 drives?) Can anyone offer any advice on any of these options, or at least steer me in the right direction? frogbs fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Jun 17, 2009 |
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Jun 17, 2009 04:23
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teamdest posted:A lot of great advice. Having just read your cautious, but very sane advice, I think i've shied away from building, or even buying an array/NAS, at least for the time being. I computed the cost per Gigabyte, and right now, its still cheaper for us to burn each program/show to DVD and keep it in an archive room. No one has to worry about maintaining the array, and the only way we'd lose all our data is if something totally catastrophic happens. The only downside is that we have to burn each disc, which takes time, and that archiving each dvd on a shelf takes up much more space than a 3u case. Damnit...I really wanted to build a NAS too :-(
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Jun 17, 2009 07:15
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deimos posted:Holy gently caress. That is insane...i'd love to read more about the software side of everything though, how they manage all that storage without going crazy.
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Sep 4, 2009 02:55
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Perhaps this isn't the correct thread to post this in, but I've read a lot of great advice in this thread, and it seems like a lot of people know what they are talking about. I have 2tb of data that is stored in a 7 disk Raid 5+1 array. The data on this array is constantly being read, as it is the file store for three cable tv channels. I've recently become a bit paranoid about the idea of the array failing, as I've already had two drives fail on me simultaneously, with no other back up solution as of yet. We basically have no money to spend on a backup solution for this array, despite the fact that it is a very important part of our operation. What I've thought of, is in lieu of having the funds to build a 8tb raid10 array or something, is to just buy an external 2tb hard drive (about $200)and mirror the array nightly. My questions is, would scanning the array nightly for changes and then copying everything over be taxing enough on the array (which is already constantly being read from at close to capacity) to lessen its lifespan? Should I instead look for a more robust backup solution, or considering my budget (essentially zero) is this my best possible choice? frogbs fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Nov 18, 2009 |
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Nov 18, 2009 04:31
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Methylethylaldehyde posted:"I billed you fuckwits an extra 3 hours of overtime and paid for the damned thing myself" would probably be the limit of the budget. Let me put it this way, we get no overtime, nor comp-time if we go over hours (which we do every week). We're a non-profit, and have to work with the expectation that most expenses can/will be reduced if we want to continue to operate in this economic climate. Thus, IT takes a back burner to salaries/benefits, which I completely understand, it actually makes my job somewhat fun, as I have to get a bit creative. And yeah, I've paid for a ton of stuff myself. If anyone is curious, we have 4 full time employees, we're very, very small. adorai posted:How much money is basically no money? As I said above "0" is the ideal, with a 'few hundred' or under a grand being the real goal. Honestly, I'd love to build an 8 or 10tb array that serves as a backup/file server for our whole (admittedly tiny) organization, but I just cant convince myself that we'd need it, let alone be able to support it (I may not be here forever). Basically i'm stuck between supporting one 2tb drive that just backs up our broadcast server, or a much larger (at least 6tb array) that backs up our broadcast server and does double duty as the file server for our organization. Is that a bad idea? I could build the array we'd need for about $2000, which I could probably get passed, if I could prove it would be worth it. Any thoughts? Anyone from the non-profit sector out there? H110Hawk posted:Correct. Use rsync --delete. If the files change infrequently you can avoid scans by using the "sync on timestamp change" option. It actually doesn't matter how taxed the system is, with no backups you're boned if it dies. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't rsync require that I set up a host on the volume to be backed up? Unfortunately this server is a vendor supplied "solution" and it may void our warranty if I go mucking around with 'their' server. frogbs fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Nov 18, 2009 |
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Nov 18, 2009 05:38
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H110Hawk posted:Well, how do you get data off the thing normally? If you can export it on anything linux/mac/windows can mount then you can back it up with rsync. If not, then yeah just drag and drop the whole drat thing every day or whatever. I can drag and drop just fine, its just that I thought RSYNC required me to configure RSYNC on the volume to be backed up, if it doesn't then that is great for me, perhaps I am just misinformed...?
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Nov 18, 2009 06:19
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So I just bought a synology DS209, and am having a few issues with it. I'm accessing it from OSX using AFP. Most of the time its fine, transfers are fast and it seems to be funcitoning perfectly. Randomly, the volume will just crash and will have to rebuilt (im running a raid 1 on two seagate 1tb drives). It seems to do this completely randomly, although I have noticed that it does it more often when I am copying from a SMB share to it, although I doubt thats related. Is my configuration to blame, or is it more likely that there is a problem with one of the drives or the synology itself?
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Dec 13, 2010 02:42
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what is this posted:I don't have that model but have had no issues with AFP/SMB/iSCSI and Synology. What version of DSM are you using? RAID1 should be reliable... I'm on the latest version, DSM 3.0-1354.
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Dec 13, 2010 23:44
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what is this posted:I'm using DSM3 as well. It never tells me that a drive is bad, it just tells me that the volume has crashed and then it re-verifies the array.
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Dec 14, 2010 03:52
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So i'm quickly running out of space on my iMac (i take a ton of photos and do a lot of video work). I've been thinking about getting a 4 bay Firewire800 raid enclosure and filling it up with 2tb drives in a raid 5 or 10. So far I think i'm leaning towards the OWC Mercury Pro Qx2 filled with 4 Hitachi 2tb drives. Can anyone recommend any similar enclosures/solutions as an alternative to the OWC model? I'm not necessarily married to the idea of a FW800 device, i'd go gigabit if someone could provide me a compelling solution. Any suggestions/thoughts?
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Dec 22, 2010 06:05
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what is this posted:Why don't you buy a Synology DS211J, put in two 2TB hard drives in RAID1, put it on your network, and continue using Time Machine? I should say that while this is a great idea, I haven't had much luck getting our Synology DS209 to talk to our iMacs. Transfers would just stop intermittently, and we were getting a ton of 'broken pipe' errors in the logs, support was excellent in trying to troubleshoot it with us, but we just couldn't figure out the problem, so we ended up returning it. I've heard other reports of Synology stuff not working well with Apple hardware. I should note that SMB through windows worked great, its just unfortunate that we are an almost entirely Mac based shop;
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Dec 29, 2010 00:41
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what is this posted:I've had no problems with synologys and macs. Their support department was completely flummoxed as well, I think it was a bad power supply. I guess if there is any information I can pass on, its that Synology's support department are extremely patient and thoughtful, I was incredibly impressed. Despite our troubles, we're considering trying another Synology product, the DS211 I thought it might be a jumbo frames issue, but I disabled them on every device and it made no difference.
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Dec 29, 2010 01:29
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frogbs posted:So i'm quickly running out of space on my iMac (i take a ton of photos and do a lot of video work). I've been thinking about getting a 4 bay Firewire800 raid enclosure and filling it up with 2tb drives in a raid 5 or 10. So far I think i'm leaning towards the OWC Mercury Pro Qx2 filled with 4 Hitachi 2tb drives. Can anyone recommend any similar enclosures/solutions as an alternative to the OWC model? I'm not necessarily married to the idea of a FW800 device, i'd go gigabit if someone could provide me a compelling solution. Any suggestions/thoughts? So i'm getting closer to pulling the trigger on the owc enclosure, can anyone offer and thoughts on it or any other owc products?
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Jan 2, 2011 05:49
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:I've been looking for something similar for ages. I've looked at the ReadyNAS Ultras, the Drobos, and the OWC stuff, and still can't decide. Unfortunately most of the people in this thread go the cheaper route and just build file servers, so there aren't many impressions on consumer/soho-grade NASes. A few in here can speak for Synology and QNAP units, but that seems to be about it. I ended up building my own NAS at work out of an old HP desktop. Its not ideal, but for our purposes at my workplace it is fine. At home however, is a different story. I cant simply repurpose an old Pentium 4 I have lying around, as that will literally double my electric bill. My iMac is already on most of the day, so i'm thinking just adding an external raid enclosure is the most economical choice. That being said, i'm sure that an atom based windows home server or synology box don't use much more power than the OWC 4 bay enclosure. Decisions, decisions! I think my plan for the time being is set up my array in a spare computer as a NAS and then migrate it to an external enclosure/turn-key system when I find one that I like.
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Jan 5, 2011 08:51
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Thermopyle posted:Are you sure about that? I can think of circumstances where this would be the case, but they're definitely outliers. I suppose I could break out the Kill-A-Watt and ballpark it, but doubling wont be far off. My energy usage is extremely minimal as is, so adding a Pentium 4 on all day with a 400w power supply is going to impact that significantly. I'll do a little math and come up with a more concrete figure....
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Jan 6, 2011 04:05
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Thermopyle posted:FWIW, the size of your power supply doesn't have anything to do with how much power a system uses. Just because it's 400W doesn't mean it's using 400W of power. It uses only what the system is demanding. I'm aware of this. I did a little research and found that a Synology Ds209 pulls down about 20w with two hard drives at 100% cpu usage. I'd be hard pressed to believe that my old 3.0ghz pentium 4 machine would pull less than that, even when idling.
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Jan 7, 2011 04:58
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Jonny 290 posted:I run a PC shop and we are ceasing sales of all Synology devices, effective immediately. We are seeing unrecoverable array crashes on multiple devices, clean out of the box. Our customers are down and we're losing tons of revenue and goodwill because our customers think we're too dumb to deploy a NAS. 5 out of the last 5 devices I have built have all experienced array failures WITHOUT any hard drive SMART errors less than three months out of the box. Two of them couldn't even build the array first time around. I bought a DS211 for use at work a few months back and we encountered this same set of problems. Support was very responsive but couldn't figure out what the problem was so we just sent it back and built a NAS in-house that has been rock-solid. Its a shame because the interface is so nice and most people dont seem to have problems. Conversely, we are an all Mac shop.
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Apr 7, 2011 15:25
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So i'm looking to buy/build a 12tb DAS for video editing/archival footage for my small TV station. My only requirements are that it connect via Firewire 800, I dont think a NAS would be right for our facility and a SAN/Fibre Channel setup would be cost prohibitive. The best bang for my buck so far that i've come across would be this offering from OWC (the Mercury Elite Qx2). Does anyone have any other reccomendations/thoughts? Based on my calculations I could build the OWC unit myself for about $100 cheaper if I bought the enclosure and drives separately, but I'd be inclined to spend the extra $100 so that I can call OWC when something goes wrong.
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Aug 3, 2011 19:05
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jeeves posted:If this is for a professional client then yes the 100$ is worth it. Don't ever build things yourself for real jobs like that, especially if the difference is only 100$ and you're not paying for it anyhow. I agree. It's for my employer, so I think it'd make sense to just pay the extra $100 or so.
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Aug 3, 2011 19:46
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Moey posted:How much actual storage do you need? You mentioned 12tb, that is only a 4 bay unit, so 12tb is before any formatting/redundancy.
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Aug 3, 2011 21:07
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Moey posted:As well as what others said, are you doing off site backup and storage of this? If this is for a TV station, the array failing and losing data may be devastating. Also depending on what kind of work they are doing, I wonder the performance out of that enclosure, and if it will have a negative impact on their work (video editing?). As it stands right now, our producers delete projects on an as-needed basis. We maintain an archive of finished, aired programming elsewhere. This would be for raw footage storage, which right now just gets deleted, never to be seen again. We're a tiny non-profit, so i'm trying to maximize our dollars spent. I'm going to propose the idea of building either two arrays, or cherry picking select stuff to back up onto external drives kept elsewhere. I'm also fine with using Raid 6 as well. As far as performance is concerned, right now they are editing off of a USB 2 GreenDrive, which is hideously slow and constantly goes to sleep. Again, that was the cheapest thing we could buy to fulfill our need at the time. I'm pretty sure the Qx2 would be much faster in most raid implementations.
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Aug 4, 2011 01:18
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teamdest posted:At which point (4 drive R6) you might as well use a Striped pair of Mirrors to avoid the write-hole and probably boost performance a bit. Does the write hole become a factor after a certain drive size, or is it a factor in an array with any size of drives? I thought I remember it being present in arrays with drives over 1.5tb, but I could be wrong. Does anyone know?
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Aug 18, 2011 17:32
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what is this posted:If you have four drives you should use RAID10 unless you absolutely need that extra capacity and have to use RAID5 for some odd reason. I'm building an array for video editing/file footage storage. We'd like to not lose everything, so I think the best option then is to buy the biggest array we can (12tb) and then use it in raid 10. Having an array that can potentially fail kind of defeats the purpose. We'll have it on a UPS, so I doubt we'd run into the write hole problem, but better safe than sorry!
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Aug 18, 2011 17:45
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teamdest posted:If you want to "Not lose everything", you need to make backups. RAID is not a backup. Make Backups. We'll have DVD backups of all finished programming. We cant afford to have another, identical raid as a backup though.
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Aug 18, 2011 20:14
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what is this posted:Sound advice! I hear everything your saying. Its just hard to justify best practices like this when money is incredibly, incredibly tight. The reality is we cant afford a backup on some sort of larger storage system. We have all our original tapes, as well as a DVD archive of aired, edited programming. We have good backup practices for our employees documents/email/user data (local redundancy with an offsite backup). That set of data is relatively small, so it's manageable. At this point i'm leaning towards either just using 3tb Raid 1 external enclosure anad adding more as we use the space. I found an enclosure that does Raid 3, am I correct in that if you lose the parity disk are you screwed?
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Aug 18, 2011 20:59
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I'm looking for some sort of NAS device that I can use as a time machine target for two Macbooks, as well as a repository for a 500gb Lightroom photo library. I'd also like to be able to hook a drive up directly to the NAS to backup it's contents. Raid 1 is all I need, it doesn't need to be super speedy. So far i'm leaning towards the WD Mybook EX2 6tb for $357. Is this a bad choice? Edit: Also, I already tried a Time Capsule. The storage/backup fucntions were fine, but it didn't work well as a router. It's DNS cache was incredibly slow (30+ seconds to lookup addresses), so I returned it and decided to look for sonething dedicated to storage. frogbs fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Aug 6, 2015 |
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Aug 6, 2015 02:41
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I'm just looking for a 4tb or 5tb hard drive to use with my Macbook for Timemachine. Ideally I want something that uses USB-C. Is this my best bet/option? https://www.amazon.com/WD-4TB-My-Passport-Ultra-Silver-Portable-External/dp/B07GKBT14V/ Some reviews say the cable it comes with sucks, and/or it's even slower when using the included usb-c -> usb-a cable. Should I be worried or just go for it?
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Oct 16, 2022 04:30
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Rexxed posted:The upside of those kind of disks is that they're small, but the downside is that internally it's a thick laptop style 2.5" drive. They make them like that because they can be entirely powered by the one plug instead of an external power brick like a 3.5" disk and they're fairly cheap. They're also kind of slow just as drives. Thank you! Yeah, I have an off-site automated backup as well, this is just extra protection incase that fails. I guess i'll go for it, it seems as good an option as any. One weird thing, the 5tb drive is only $5 more than the 4tb. Should I stay away from 5tb drives for some reason?
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Oct 16, 2022 17:15
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Does anyone have a data recovery service for a mechanical hard drive failure that they can recommend? It's a Seagate Barracuda from an old iMac, it sounds like the heads might have failed. There's so many different vendors and places that seem like scams/bait-and-switch operations that it's hard to get a sense of what's legit. Desert Data Recovery in AZ seems like it has a good reputation from some Reddit threads, but that's still only based on a few recommendations i've found. There doesn't seem to be one go-to vendor. I'm in VA if that makes a difference, or if anyone knows of something local.
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Nov 25, 2022 20:12
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Another storage question for today. I'm on a Mac, which filesystem is better for an external hard drive these days, HFS or APFS? I'm consolidating all my old external hard drives into one new 5tb external. I'm a little worried that if I choose HFS that Apple will deprecate it and i'll have to reformat. APFS is also 'new' and I've heard some people still don't trust it 100%, but maybe those are just ubernerd worryowrts. Any opinions?
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Nov 26, 2022 01:03
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Computer viking posted:I'd worry a lot more about a random external drive failing in physical ways than about APFS issues taking it out, if that helps? In my experience exFat has been a data black hole. If you initially format the drive on Windows with exFat it will not be readable on most Macs (post Catalina I think). I think MacOS can only mount partitions with a very specific block size. I’ve also heard it lacks some of the janitorial features of more modern formats like HFS and APFS. And yes, I’ll be backing this external drive up offsite as well in case it fails. Edit: lol, exFat is not journaled, so I’m not going to rely on it for anything remotely important. frogbs fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Nov 26, 2022 |
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Nov 26, 2022 06:36
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:APFS makes no promises about data integrity nor even using checksumming, with Apple engineers instead proclaiming that users should trust the hardware - because that's worked so well in the past. Interesting, thank you for the info! I think I’m going to stick with HFS for now.
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Nov 26, 2022 17:32
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Does anyone use a NAS with their Lightroom library? I’ve been using an external SSD with Live Previews but am getting tired of attaching/detaching the drive. Would one of the two bay Synology NAS in raid 1 be fine for this, or would it be laggy as hell over wifi?
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Dec 1, 2022 23:39
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