External hard drive - recommendations?

[Flyoverland Captive]

Just talked to OWC, they're sending a warranty replacement.

I'm still considering a dual-drive mirrored system, though.

"Media server"? Can you add 2 bare drives to it and accomplish what you desire?

I have two systems:

#1 is my media server, and contains nothing but pictures and music files. It has a 1TB internal drive, and is backed up to a pair of 1TB WD externals, one of which is kept at the bank. For more redundancy, every month or so the files are backed up to the OWC 2TB drive, which is attached to:

#2, which has an internal 1TB containing all my work files. This is the PC that gets backed up daily to the OWC external; WIN10 also runs file history onto the OWC.

If I add a mirrored 2x2TB system to PC#2, I can add another level of security in case one fails. Right now, with the OWC dead, all the data on the work PC is in only one place. If the internal drive fails before I get the new OWC hooked up, I'm in trouble.

[highangle]

Computer storage is actually fun. You can build magic systems with your own two hands.

Someone gave me an Irulu tablet. It's basically an ARM Surface that tries to run full Win 10 on 2G of ram and some painfully slow storage. I can't upgrade the ram, but I put a SanDisk Extreme SD card in it, an ethernet to USB converter, and got it to boot off my network. It's 5x as fast running a copy of its own OS to bypass the part of it's hardware I don't like. heh

This is made possible by a TFTP server on my router, which is virtualized on VMWare like my NAS, which serves up 10-bit 4K and 24 192 bit-perfect audio to every TV & phone and lappy and stereo in the house.

Total software costs=$0

[Flyoverland Captive]

^^^ I know my way around a PC, but this kind of shit annoys me; things should just WORK! My free time is better spent sipping beer in the hammock.

[highangle]

^^^ I know my way around a PC, but this kind of shit annoys me; things should just WORK! My free time is better spent sipping beer in the hammock.

If you want things to "Just work", it costs extra.
If you're willing to learn a thing or two, shit's free except for the bare drives and steezy enclosures.



If you just want to write a check, go with Synology stuffed with way more space than you need.
5900RPM drives should be fine with your largely "Write once" workloads like backups and media, while consuming less power than 7200RPM HDDs.

[Benny Profane]

Go back to OWC. Shit breaks, always have a redundant drive. It's cheap these days.

[Flyoverland Captive]

^^^ Sticking with OWC for now.

Highangle, the VM route intrigues me... I'll do some research. Might be nice to simplify and consolidate.

[digitaldeath]

"Computer storage is fun"

Good god sir


Hope all u data hoarders know that those drives have like a 10 year half life. Mag tape is more stable

[Flyoverland Captive]

Yeah, we know. Thus the redundancy.

[highangle]

"Computer storage is fun"

Good god sir


Hope all u data hoarders know that those drives have like a 10 year half life. Mag tape is more stable

That's why you want your lolcatz, limewire mp3s, and Hyundai Honey milf porn in a Copy On Write file system with end-to-end checksumming and parity. You want to run it in error corrected (ECC) memory too.

You can build your own ZFS NAS on milspec hardware for really cheap, if you don't mind the power consumption and coil noise of retired Aegis-class 48VDC targeting servers.

[k2skier112]

Why aren't you considering SSD's?

[Flyoverland Captive]

Why aren't you considering SSD's?

Cost. They're expensive for 2TB versions.

[RShea]

There are only 2 major drive manufactures out there with a complete line- Western Digital and Seagate. Toshiba still builds some 2.5 inch portable drives and a few other specialty drives like their Canvio external portable drives. All the other companies were bought up and basically merged into the big 2 mentioned- Hitachi/IBM, Fujitsu, Samsung, and a long list of other companies over the years are shut down or sold out/merged.

That being said, there are tons of companies that make enclosures, cases, Nas etc. devices (some sell just the cases/enclosures) others sell their stuff with the drives already inside of them.

Buffalo, QNap, Synology, and then WD and Seagate all sell a number of configurations and capacities for Nas. WD owns G-Technology (which used to be Hitachi and then HSGT. Nas storage requires power, so how important is the portability? Only 2.5 inch drives will usually run as external drives powered only off the USB ports, and most all of those are single drive solutions.

If you want reliable- then need to look at the enterprise class drives- those built for servers that are hit hard day in and day out 24x7. Most of the server class drives still offer a 5 year warranty (compared to external portable hard drives which most are only 1 year warranties.
Raid 1 (mirrored) data across 2 drives, can offer redundancy against a single drive failure, but does not protect from needing some sort of drive rotation if you are using it for regular backups of data, or combined with cloud backup strategy depending on the bandwidth you have and your budget.

Also if you just want enclosures take a look at CRU, they have a long line of trays, enclosures, cases. and Nas type of stuff. Many mentioned Lacie- they started out years ago with a bit of a Mac drive niche, but they are owned by Seagate now and basically do enclosures and Nas stuff - just like a number of other companies out there.

[highangle]

Why aren't you considering SSD's?

Cost per TB in mass storage. My Solaris rpool is a 3-way mirror of overprovisioned ESXi datashares on 3 SSDs, but it's only 100GB. But my 17TB of lossless music and family video sits on rotating rust on another pool of the same Solaris system, and gets block-encrypted on AWS as backup.


SSDs also make great cache devices for large ZFS storage pools. So if you're running a VM in your laptop off a folder on your NAS that is cached with a SSD, the VM will boot and run at SSD speeds. (Yes, you can cache a specific folder like that with ZFS.)

And if you're slinging big data in your bedroom and doing a lot of sync writes, slc nand is really good for intent logs (aka power-safe write cache).

But an SSD doesn't stream a movie to a home theater or upload shit to Crashplan any faster or better than a RAID array of HDDs, so why spend the $$?

[ex-powderbroker]

I had a mirror with WD shit the bed. Still miss all those photos. Fuck WD.

[Flyoverland Captive]

I had a mirror with WD shit the bed. Still miss all those photos. Fuck WD.

Did both drives fail? I thought the whole point of a mirror is redundancy?

[ex-powderbroker]

Software update fucked it.

[Flyoverland Captive]

Ahh... well that sucks. I told a friend back in 2006 how to defrag and clean up his laptop's HD. He did as I instructed, but didn't back anything up first. He lost a shit-ton of family photos, and blamed me.

[SuccessfulRoach]

You guys are running around in circles.

[Flyoverland Captive]

You guys are running around in circles.

You're back DD? Nothing to contribute?

[highangle]

I backed up a Win10 laptop to my NAS with the built-in "Windows 7 Backup". Averaged 940mbps (117.5 MBps) transfer speed to schlep 180 gigs across a gigE LAN. Happiness is a good network.

[highangle]

You're back DD? Nothing to contribute?

Don't roaches think running around in circles is fkn awesome?

[Swine]

External portable RAID array? I don't know if that's a thing, but a NAS device would suit you nicely if the storage can stay put at home, or doesn't move very often. Most are bare devices and then you can buy a proper HD separately. I've setup two of these at my network of dental establishments using Synology device with WD Red NAS drive. The Synology drives can also be setup to automatically backup to the cloud via dropbox, amazon glacier, etc.

i.e this x2 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...Q&gclsrc=aw.ds

plus this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-236-_-Product

I got this exact setup for my work. We needed remote access and Synology has pretty good software to get it done. Red drives seem to be the most reliable for storage. It was easy. It works. I had better shit to do than cobble together enclosures or do more research.

Having said that my OWC Mercury Elite Pro is chugging along just fine at home. But drives do just shit the bed from time to time.

[digitaldeath]

Milspec hardware. Lol. Like ps3s

[highangle]

Gonna Hyundai up your bunker too?

[digitaldeath]

Laugh all you want. My intel network is superior to ur little network
http://www.popsci.com/technology/art...playstation-3s