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About AndreasKa

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  1. I've not used storage spaces so can't comment. There are many variables but it seems to be that software RAID is the way to go these days from a consumer perspective and nested hardware RAIDs are getting around some of the issues on a larger scale
  2. Glad to hear some of my info was helpful. Answers to your questions below: 1) I'm using the transparent RAID (tRAID) product 2) currently I have 3 drives (2 data + 1 parity) with a view to add another data drive as required. Due to the ability of reading the drives outside of the array if things go awry, I don't feel the need for more parity drives with such a small array 3) I have a windows laptop with a 4 bay enclosure connected to it (the FlexRAID array) and i'm just using SyncBack to backup the NAS shares over the network. Not the most elegant solution but working for now. Moreover: 1) Bitrot is simply a random data bit being changed 'silently' due to things like the magnetic material losing polarity. It is not detected by most file systems and others use 'scrubbing' (i.e. to re-write the data periodically) to reduce the chance of it happening 2) As above, the amount of magnetic material used to store one bit of information is nowadays incredibly small and the difference between a 1 and a 0 in terms of detected voltage/magnetism is shrinking. 3) most HDDs max temp is stated as 55-60c but if you've ever touched a HDD that's 50+ you know that's already crazy hot. I aim for low-mid 40's
  3. Hi There, I went through a similar process as yourself not so long ago. I recently purchased a Netgear NAS to provide consolidated, instant access to both critical (documents) and non-critical (media) files. then I also wanted to update my backup solution to backup the data on the NAS. Firstly, regarding the drive age question: I agree with the not-broke sentiment above, however I suggest a couple of things to do to reduce your risk of sudden catastrophic failure. 1) pre-clear the disk. This basically just smashes the drive with I/O for an extended period and uncovers bad sectors in the process. ( 2) run something like 'stablebit scanner' on drives that already have data to 1) review SMART data in an understandable way and 2) find bad sectors. I ended up having to bin 3 drives after these steps cause they weren't up to snuff Ultimately, I went with FlexRAID for my backup solution for a few reasons which I think may answer your question: 1) It runs on windows and has a GUI 2) it has a number of smart data protection technologies built in ( 3) It removes some of the drawbacks of keeping backups on proprietary RAID systems, as discussed below; 4) You can use drives that you have lying around to create the backup array and use all their capacity towards the array (either storage or parity protection) 5) It has additional levels of "protection" that are nice compared to something like RAID 5: you can un-fail drives if they get dropped from the array but actually have nothing wrong with them if your array screws up for some reason, you can access the remaining files on the drives using windows, without fancy recovery software Ditto the above if the controller/mobo dies. If this happens with a hardware solution you need to find the exact same controller with exact same firmware if you need to recover the array I personally consider these things combined as more than 2 levels of protection for my data: 1) Netgear NAS 2)FlexRAID parity to recover 1 failed drive 3) recovery of remaining data in a standard windows environment if it all really hits the fan. Hope this provides some insight for you.