External Storage Pool

bluesnake · 28 March 2016 at 1:57AM

pappa_golf wrote: »

does anyone actually provide a dial up service ?

good old freeserve , or even better the free internet Co

Papa, you not only get fax pools, but print, storage (disk) and server pools too. Fax was point to point, and you only had to dial the persons number and let the fax play the tones to connect. Nothing to do with dialup isp. Yes, some people still do use faxes.

I too would have used a nas setup, possibly re-purposing your old PC. Out of cheapness, my first choice, and possibly the best is a PC running Solaris/BSD/Linux using ZFS. You tube shows you how. This uses storage/drive pools.

My second Choice - the lazy way, would be to use https://lime-technology.com/ and unRaid, but this costs.

Why not to go for it all internally on the windows box? Well if your controller fails/new motherboard, you may loose the disk raid, and formatting them, re-raiding and then restoring the data may be the only option. In business, people do not tend to trust software raid, but use a bespoke hardware raid card. Again should this fail, the new raid card even of the same type, may have a different raid firmware.

NTFS is not the greatest for large volumes and MS have brought out ReFS, but for me this is in its infancy and too new to trust, but it may suit you, if it is even on windows 10 Home? Also windows takes days to chkdsk on large ntfs volumes and not self healing.

Other issues that effect bays, and PCs, is how large a Sata drive the system will support. Very old motherboards and external enclosures only supported up to 2TB per drive, but these days you get 6T drives, but will your system support it?

In your case, unless that data is only needed short term, like video conversion, think about using a hot spare.

Since you want to use and internal setup, please write on the disk with an indelible pen to which port it is wired into from the motherboard.