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A Mega Storage Solution

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  • 05-02-2007 1:16pm
    #1
    Raskolnikov
    Registered Users Posts: 10,148 ✭✭✭✭


    Right, so I'm in the situation where I have upwards of 4TB's of data that I need stored and backed up. My old means of storage was simply backing up everything onto DVD-R. To be honest, I'm sick to death of this though as it's ridiculously time consuming (rip the copy, compress it, then right it onto disk). Plus, at this stage, I have so many disks and wallets, it's a chore to to find what I want. Not to mention, discs get scratched, fail, get CRC errors, etc.

    My idea at the moment is to get four of these, connect them up with a USB hub and hide them away somewhere. That gives me my 4TB's of storage that's instantly accessible from my desktop, only problem is that it's €1,700, that's a lot of DVD-R's!

    Another possibility for me is to use disks I already have. I have 1.5TB's of storage spread over several 40-300GB disks already. What if I bought enclosures for these, use lots of USB hubs to connect them all up. Lots of disks, lots of space, not ideal but at least it allows me up to 127 disks on an ad-hoc basis.

    Anyone got any ideas or solutions?


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    #2
    Cuddlesworth
    Registered Users Posts: 13,995 ✭✭✭✭Cuddlesworth


    I would go for some sort of NAS storage box, but no matter what you still going to be looking at around 1500+ for 4tb of storage.

    Best option would be buy some 320gig drives to replace the smaller ones you have and pick up enclosures for most of the drives. Then buy a Nas box with Usb inputs and keep a small selection of drives plugged in via Usb.


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    #3
    mick.fr
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,974 ✭✭✭mick.fr


    Why not a real NAS with a tape drive ?

    Or you could make your own NAS, working on Linux or Windows with some RAID system (Soft or Hard). Connect to this NAS via the network.

    500 GB Hard Drives are 155 euros on Komplett. Cheap enough.


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    #4
    po0k
    Registered Users Posts: 15,815 ✭✭✭✭po0k


    Get a 12-disk SAS enclosure, and a suitable host machine to serve it out. You can setup several arrays then, migrating things around as you cycle through disks.
    You can use SAS or SATA drives, as SAS is backwards compatible with SATA.


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    #5
    Inspector Gadget
    Registered Users Posts: 1,393 ✭✭✭Inspector Gadget


    I'm not going to suggest a solution, unfortunately, but I think that before this question can be best answered, it'd be useful to get an idea as to how often the data is likely to be retrieved and/or changed after the initial backup - simplistically, frequently = disk storage, infrequently = tape storage in terms of cost per GB, but it would all depend on how often it's both read and changed (requiring that it be written back to the backup). You'd also need to consider the lead time in getting the data back off the backup - do you need instant access or can you wait for 15+ minutes to retrieve it?

    The reliability and expected lifespans of the media you're using are very important - data spread across several hard disks requires some degree of redundancy (RAID etc.) to help mitigate against hard disk failure (after all, they are complex, precision-engineered devices - which is why those 1GB WD external drives you mentioned, that contain two drives, are roughly twice as likely to keel over from the loss of one of the disks as a large single disk would be), whereas tapes have few moving parts but are more sensitive to atmospheric conditions (especially moisture).

    There are a lot of things to think about, but as has been said before, storing 4TB still isn't cheap, but it's getting better.

    Hope this helps,
    Gadget


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    #6
    Raskolnikov
    Registered Users Posts: 10,148 ✭✭✭✭Raskolnikov


    SyxPak wrote:
    Get a 12-disk SAS enclosure, and a suitable host machine to serve it out. You can setup several arrays then, migrating things around as you cycle through disks.
    Can you recommend one of these and where could I pick it up online?

    Inspector: I don't need to worry about redundancy as I'm backing up from DVD's and CD's that I already have. I've pretty much ruled out tapes as it'll just leave me with the same problems as using DVD's. Also the idea is that I'll have a single data source, that's instantly (or close to instant) accessible to my media centre.

    The best option for me still is to get those four 1TB external drives.


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    #7
    po0k
    Registered Users Posts: 15,815 ✭✭✭✭po0k


    A recent review:
    http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2919
    I think that's a bit above your price-range though.

    One I was looking at for storage for a CompSoc:
    http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2018300,00.asp
    Enclosure + card is about 800euro. Note the sata port multiplier config, 2 disks are directly connected and the other 10 go through 5-1 port multipliers.

    These things are a bit expensive, but if you have a box available to act as the fileserver, you can use whatever kind of raid you like. Linux md software raid0/1/5 modes are reliable and portable, or you could something like LVM.
    XFS would be a filesystem you might want to consider too if you intend storing lots of large files.

    These are just some ideas for large amounts of storage, I suggest you look at what you want to achieve and how valuable your data is.
    Particularly examine the worst-case scenario.


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