7TB Storage Considerations

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Hello all!

I'm looking to weigh out some options regarding storage.

Available to me is my main rig, which consists of:
    Lian-Li PC-V353 Case
    520W Corsair PSU
    Intel i5-2400
    8GB RAM
    MSI Z68 mATX Mobo
    1x 128GB Crucial M4 SSD
    1x 2.5" 1TB Hard Drive (not installed)
    2x 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 7200RPM Hard Drives (not installed)
    Windows 7 Ultimate

My primary needs are:
    Data safety - primarily pictures and videos of my newborn and business records
    Remote file synchronization and accessibility - a la Dropbox mostly for Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop files

Are there any recommended configurations and software that would allow me to do this?


Smells like a software question, not an Other Hardware question.

But I'll bite-- from a hardware perspective, what exactly are you worried about? Is it just potential drive failure, or is it accidental corruption/erasure as well?

From a drive failure perspective, you either need to run RAID (not RAID0) of some sort. The problem is, that does NOT protect you from accidental corruption or erasure or whatnot. For those, only a proper backup, kept separately, will save you.

Also, are you willing to pay for backup? How much data did you need to synchronize remotely?

If you just need critical files backed up online and/or synchronized remotely and it's under 2GB (or under 8GB, I think that's as big as Dropbox and many of their competitors get), you can probably just use 2 separate services. One, like Dropbox, for synchronization, and the a separate backup service (CrashPlan or Backblaze or whatever) for backup.

I believe Crashplan and some others support both simultaneous local and remote backup, so I would be picking up a pair of external 4TB harddisks as well and attaching them via eSATA or USB 3.0 for that purpose. If you want to be really paranoid, pick up four of them, and rotate them out weekly...
Thanks for the comment continuum. Nice to see some us geezers from 1999 still around ;)

I'm considering RAID1 array and using the 1TB as a backup for the most important stuff on the RAID array. RAID0, though exciting, is a scary consideration with the shear amount of data loss possible.

Ideally I'd like to keep costs low (never realized how expensive diapers were) and utilize current resources rather than pay for backup. I suppose a few dropbox accounts would suffice for the most part.

Would running a FreeNAS VM be a feasible consideration? Or is this a disaster waiting to happen?
FreeNAS much prefers to be directly exposed to the hardware, especially if you are going to use any of its RAID features built-in.

A serious consideration isn't just hardware failure, but accidental corruption/deletion of data-- hence why separate backups are generally considered essential...
If cost is a major factor, a bunch of 2T USB/eSATA drives connected only during backups is your best bet. Other things that can handle 7T usable x daily/weekly rotation is way more expensive. With proper backups, you don't have to make your RAID bullet proof or use RAID at all.
While not 7TB, our backups go on a separate HD which is then placed in a media-rated fire safe. IIRC the fire safe cost us $33.

We don't bother with the external drive. Hooking up an internal SATA drive is fast enough for the occasional backup, and takes up less space.

1999 represent!
I use a two QNAP NAS as my network storage, each with a RAID 6, and I have a 3TB drive on the shelf next to them as a hot spare. They contain mostly DVD rips and other media, but also the network storage for my VMWare VMs. For backup, I keep all important stuff in a personal share, and back that up to a rotating set of three 1TB drives that I rotate weekly. I got a toaster style, eSATA connected drive caddie to make it easy. The caddie is attached to my workstation, and it runs a weekly backup job.

The nice thing about the caddie is that since the computer sees it as internal storage. I can pop a drive in there, install a test OS, and boot to it from the boot device selection menu from my BIOS. When upgrading the OS, I can swap the drives after it is all set up and tweaked, without losing use of my functioning OS.
papadage wrote:

<pedant mode on>
Cold spare, not hot spare.
</pedant mode off>

Compromise.. lukewarm spare..
What would make it a cold spare? Keeping it in a different room? :p
Alamout wrote:

Keep it in the refrigerator so it doesn't spoil.
Another 1999 relic checking in.
pomidor wrote:
(never realized how expensive diapers were)

OT but if you think diapers are bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet, noob. :p

Seriously, though, congrats in the kid department.
Another 1999er checking in...

So FreeNAS, reasonable substitution for hardware RAID? Or does it largely depend on the number of disks in the pool?
If you want to keep costs low then I'd suggest a few things (I'm assuming a single user - possibly working from a home office):

Ditch RAID altogether. Keep your primary storage in the desktop PC. Backup regularly. Even go to 2 backups before RAID. RAID is a solution for keeping data available in the face of hardware failure only, not secure in face of everything else that can go wrong. If you stick 1 of the drives slated for RAID into a USB enclosure and backup daily you only run the risk of losing 1 day to a drive failure (and probably less than 1 day) while gaining protection from all the other forms of loss.

Do not try to build some arbitrary "future proof" amount of storage. Instead build enough to last about a year while buying drives in the pricing sweet spot, typically 1 or 2 steps down from the largest single drive available. Disasters aside, drive pricing is unlikely to rise in a meaningful way.

Consider buying or building (freenas or any OS you are comfortable with that can share files) a standalone box that is turned on and used solely for backup.

Use software that can do some sort of comparison/verification with or without running a new backup. Can be as simple as teracopy or robocopoy+hashdeep.

Remote file access solutions depend on a lot of factors so you'd need to give more detail, however some NAS devices have remote access features and you could use them as the primary storage instead of the PC.
16 posts