[B]Hard Drive Storage Space[/B]

milkjunkie90

Hi. Im not sure if this is the right section for this thread but here goes...

I have a considerable collection of movies and music and as a photographer i have a huge amount of photos also. I currently have three 500gb Western Digital My Passports full as well as a near full hard drive. I am wondering what to do next. I like to have access to all of my files at once.

I am currently considering buying a Western Digital 3tb External Drive as well which should give me more space, plus the option to back up the other drives.
Am i going about this the wrong way by just buying more and more external drives or is there a better solution? I don't know much about servers. Or is there a more cost efficient way of buying hard drives, perhaps not externals? My internet isn't fast enough for cloud computing...

Im a bit of a newbie to this sort of thing so any help/advice would be appreciated
Thanks

Access

Easiest option IMO... buy the 3TB external and put all your media/photos/files onto it... BUT - keep your 3 other drives as backups of the same files.

You could even transfer your 3 other drives to a friends/parents house and store them securely there - just in case of break in/fire/flood etc. in your own place.

Get one of these: http://go.iomega.com/en/products/network-attached-storage-nas/ix4-200d-cloud/ix4-200d-cloud/

milkjunkie90

Deleted User wrote: »

Get one of these: http://go.iomega.com/en/products/network-attached-storage-nas/ix4-200d-cloud/ix4-200d-cloud/

Thanks, but a little outside my price range lol

antomack

Amazon have a 4TB external for about €165 delivered at the moment although it says 1 to 2 months for delivery!!

Hitachi Tuoro 4TB

milkjunkie90

milkjunkie90 wrote: »

Am i going about this the wrong way by just buying more and more external drives or is there a better solution? I don't know much about servers. Or is there a more cost efficient way of buying hard drives, perhaps not externals? My internet isn't fast enough for cloud computing...

Mirroring is the simplest solution and the one with least scope for problems. But obviously you need to buy 2x the storage.

There are various ways of achieving some level of redundancy without buying 2x the storage. Striped and unstriped redundant arrays. Most people know of RAID 5 etc.

unRAID is popular for media storage, and its an unstriped array which is probably more suitable for media. If you have 3x1TB of data then you just need one extra 1TB drive for parity. And if you need 6x1TB of data then you still just need 1 extra 1TB parity drive.

Its important to note that it isn't a backup. All the parity drive does is let you reconstruct the data from one failed drive. And the array is unstriped which means each drive has its own readable filesystem with intact files in the event of some catastrophic failure.

Unraid needs to run on its own system, but I use something similar on Windows called Flexraid.

phantom_lord

For backup:

http://www.crashplan.com/