Storage Server with RAID or not

victor2

Been looking through this thread with more curiosity than anything else.
That is a huge amount of storage space, readers can only speculate as to what the data is and it's not entirely relevant to the discussion if one accepts that such a capacity is required.
Some level of RAID will of course provide a level of redundancy amongst the drives, and doesn't have to sacrifice a lot of storage capacity, typically only one drive in the array.
That would be my choice, as it should cope with the almost inevitable failure of one drive. If the data is irreplaceable (such as a huge library of historic video footage for example), then you presumably have some sort of off-site data retention, updated at reasonable intervals.

I_have_spoken

I'd setup using Lime Technology unRAID

were

be wary about raid, especially if certain parts of the disk data is not being re-written too, as there is something called 'bit rot'. On larger volumes this tends for be more factual that just a statistic.

If you really want to keep your data, keep it simple, and have multiple copies across different media types... and you have to periodically check those media type too. Start to fragment stuff up across different versions of drives, controllers, firmware, obsolete hardware, is all asking for trouble - KISS

I have seen in enterprise setups SANs fail, raid 1 and raid 5 failures. They are good, but still fail. These setups have multiple controllers and high spec drives. Better, often propriety systems run raid 6, have online spare drives too and make the top consumer level spec zfs look like a poor relation.

For non changing data on disks, besides multiple copies, would recommend the freeware Multipar https://multipar.eu/ to be used on all your archived media types.

Victor2 mentions 'Off-site data retention', somewhere down the line it inevitably becomes someone's on-site data retention

thescouselander

d0nkeyk0ng wrote: »

Assuming all devices are at home, what do you do if your house catches fire and destroys everything?

I'd look at cloud storage for "off site" back up.

^^^^ this. Why faf about with all sorts of complicated equipment when you can have superior off site backup for a very reasonable price?

were

thescouselander wrote: »

^^^^ this. Why faf about with all sorts of complicated equipment when you can have superior off site backup for a very reasonable price?

"superior off site backup"... I would like to go to a betting shop today and put a few quid on a superior team Man City to have won 2015-2016 championship. However there is no guarantee they will win this year, they may be relegated, they may even go broke and vanish, other have. Same can be said for cloud storage, you never know the future of a company, and they do not even know it, but they can sell you a vision of perfection.

S0litaire

Other option, you can rent/run your own virtual server from places like DigitalOcean, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud platform.

Simple OwnCloud install + as much storage as you can afford and off you go...

jamesd

If it's Windows 8 or later consider using Windows Storage Spaces. That can provide RAID fault tolerance if you have at least three drives. If you can move the drives to another computer using say USB enclosures you can get at the data if the first one fails. That gets you fault tolerance across both the hard drives and the RAID "enclosure".

You're still potentially vulnerable to things that delete or encrypt your data to extort money from you. A drive that is not normally turned on can protect you from that. A web service you're constantly connected to will just store the new unreadable version but if it has a history feature you might be able to get an earlier version.