4TB not enough, hows this? (1 Viewer)

[garriew]

I thougth 4TB would be enough and boy was I wrong.

I have an eSata, 1 firewire and 2 USB ports free on the back.

I have have two free IDE slots but putting them in the case would cause airflow/heat problems, I think, as it already has 4HDs and a DVD drive in it.

So, I am considering not ever botherig w/ the IDE and just go external and I found:
TowerRAID TR5M1 - 5 Bay SATA to eSATA (Port Multiplier) JBOD / RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 Enclosure

It will allow me 5 more 1tb drives. I think...

Would it be better to use JBOD or RAID0? I'm not concerned about backups. (I put all my internal drives as 4, actually 5, drives.)

Would I have to add 5 drives at once or could I put in two now and more later? I dont know anything, really, about this type of stuff.

Other suggestions?

 

[funkstar]

Personally i would use RAID-5. RAID isn't a substitute for a backup, but it would be very annoying to loose all your data if one of the 5 drives failed in a RAID-0 or JBOD setup.

That enclosure is literally just that, an enclosure, the drives would appear to windows as 5 seperate drives as though they were plugged into a motherboad and housed internally to the PC. The spces don't say if the software controlling RAID/JBOD can handle online capacity expansion or RAID level migration, so I have no idea if you can start with a couple of drives and then add more later.

How much is this setup do you know? Have you looked at how this compares to a 5 drive NAS box? i presume this would be cheaper due to it being a lot less sofisticated, but they difference might not be that huge. Worth looking inot if you ask me.

 

[garriew]

It's $229 from NewEgg.

I'd really rather just have each one be a seperate drive. It that possible w/ that enclosure? I mean could I just put drives in it and have them as H - L?

If you do RAID0 or JBOD and one drive crashes, do you lose data from all the drives? I was under the impression that they put a file all on one disk and didnt span it across multiple disks.

MTIA!

 

[jestermgee]

I use to have the same issue with not enough HDD space, but this was a few years ago when I had a couple of drives inside and outside my server totalling about 800GB... My aim was to create a central storage solution that was expandable as HDD prices came down, was power friendly in that if I didn't have any machines that needed to access it online the HDD storage would power down and was able to be accessed by anything on the network...

I just built a "server" PC out of a nice cheap motherboard and CPU with 1GB ram. Without HDD the whole "PC" cost about $450 AU which is cheaper than any network attached storage unit I could find. Because I don't need a monitor or anything on it (I VNC into it) I didn't need the cost of a vid card and got a MODO with on-board video. The PC is a very low grade kind of machine but at the moment has 2TB over 4 SATA drives in a JBOD arrangement and when that becomes completely full I will upgrade the drives to 1TB drives, then start adding SATA controllers to add more HDDs.

Works very well and saves on power by shutting down automatically, plus you have all your windows management and everything too.

Seems like a nice, easy and tidy solution to me especially for futureproofing.

 

[zicoz]

Personally i would use RAID-5. RAID isn't a substitute for a backup, but it would be very annoying to loose all your data if one of the 5 drives failed in a RAID-0 or JBOD setup.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in a JBOD you'll only loose the data on the disk that crashes won't you? The rest of the data will survive.


But back to topic, I would sugest building a separate server if you have more then 1 TB data (or 1.5 now that the 1.5TB disks are popping out), there are many easy and cheap solutions out there. An old computer with Freenas, Nexenta Core or a Linux distro will work wonders. The most expencive part will always be the harddrives, and you can get ridd of alot of heat and noise with just a system disk in the HTPC.

 

[garriew]

I decided to go ahead and get two of these and set them both as JBOD and have one to store on and one for backups. I figure I can just run a weekly backup. This way, i it does fail, the backup will be a mirror of it. Just change the drive letter and go.

I'm also going to get Newegg.com - SANS DIGITAL TR4U-B 4 Bay SATA to USB 2.0 JBOD / Spanning Enclosure - Server RAID Systems so I can do it as JBOD and use it to back up my current drives. I have considered getting 3 of these and not getting the two eSATA ones though.

Would USB 2.0 be fast enough to rip to and play DVDs from?

Whats the benefis of building an external server?

I also looked at the docs for the TR4U and it said that if DRIVE 1 fails, you lose all DATA if you re running in "combined" mode but if 3 fails, you only lose 3 and 4.

 

[zicoz]

Well in a HTPC environment the biggest reason is less heat and noise in the HTPC, simply build a box, and store it another room, but it also makes it easier to work with the content on the server without having to make sure that the HTPC isn't in use or having to run around the house making sure it's on.

 

[jestermgee]

Also allows for easy expansion and additional clients. If you plan on having more than `1 media PC (one int he lounge and in the bedroom for instance) then it definately makes it worth it since everything is central and you can access it from other machine. Setup some Wake On Lan messages and some auto-shutdown scripts and you also have something that is energy efficient.

Different options for different people.

 

[garriew]

Oh ok.

I dont have any plans for other rooms and my current box, is almost dead silent. Which is strange becuase it has 4 fans (two blowing on the 4 HDs an two outsakes) plus the cpu and PS. It runs around 40degrees

 

[funkstar]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in a JBOD you'll only loose the data on the disk that crashes won't you? The rest of the data will survive.

It depends on the controllers/softwares handling of JBOD. Often if one drive in the stripe dies, the whole things needs to be re-built so you loose all the data.