Raid Network Storage at Home?

[Leithen]

Working from home, wired the house with cat6 when we refurbed it last year, running 3 macs and a pc - already have a "server room" cupboard with patch panel, router, hardware firewall, switch etc - plenty of room to fit more stuff.

Completely hopeless backup routines/strategy for the machines, as well as burgeoning digital photo and music collection, so I've been thinking about some basic network storage to centralise everything and try and free up some space on a couple of the macs by shifting photos and music files.

I'm thinking of an Infrant ReadyNAS 1 Terabyte setup , but I'm rapidly losing what little depth I have here - anyone have any advice or experience going down this route?

[puggit]

We've got a small NAS device at home - which only has one disk, so there's no redundancy (yet...). It's connected via wireless router.

I'd advise that if you can, use RAID 1. This means that everything is mirrored from one disk to the next, and if you lose one disk it's relatively easy to recover.

RAID 5 uses a clever method which means that you can afford to lose one disk from a set and then recreate the missing disk from data on the disks which didn't crash - this takes time.

I also work in storage - so any questions chuck them my way

[Leithen]

Thanks puggit, where to start......

Here are the prices of the puppy in question. Circa £669 seems to get an "out of the box" four disk or two disk 1TB device. Probably not the cheapest make/model, but it seems to be getting rave reviews as well as being relatively silent (despite being in a cupboard I'd like it not to sound like an airliner).

From there, I'm wondering about software - it comes with EMC Retrospect 5-user license software - any good?

After that, I'm wondering about disk formats re mac / windows use and how easy it's going to be to use the device for both backup and remote storage of photo's / music files.....

Tip of the iceberg.....

[leorest]

I'm not claiming to be any sort of an expert but the only dealings (2nd hand) I've had with raid/disk mirroring has been three failures where the mirroring faithfully copied the corrupt/dieing disk and overwrote the good data on the other disks. The concept sounds good in theory but does it work in practice? Has anyone had a failed disk and seamlessly thrown a new'un in? I bow out to others who post here more regularly as they clearly have more experience.

[puggit]

I've not heard of this manufacturer, but I'm sure someone will come along who does - not to say they are no good, I work with arrays carrying hunderds of disks!

Retrospect will do the job, easy to use - but its far from the best in the market

If you plan on expanding beyond 500GB then take the box with 2 disks - if not take the 4 disk box as it has more flexibility and redundancy

[agent006]

leorest said:

Has anyone had a failed disk and seamlessly thrown a new'un in? I bow out to others who post here more regularly as they clearly have more experience.

Yes. The key factor is the quality of the RAID controller. I've swapped a few thousand disks for work over the last few years and never had one go wrong in that way. You need a controller that can identify a dieing disk before it starts to corrupt the data.

[Miles_stylus]

I have just got a Buffalo 1TB with Raid 5 which would seem to be a solution?

[Zad]

In system failures, it isn't always just the physical drive that fails. Controllers can go loopy and mangle both sets of data, viruses can get in and kill the data, power supplies can overvolt, things burst into flames, burglars run off with the machine (you get the idea).

Just get a cheap 300GB external USB2 drive, plug it into the local machine, copy stuff over. Then lock it up in a different part of the house, or better still someone else's house.

[Leithen]

Miles_stylus said:

I have just got a Buffalo 1TB with Raid 5 which would seem to be a solution?

Miles, can you give me any further info about how you are using it - software, setup, windows/mac etc?

Zad said:

In system failures, it isn't always just the physical drive that fails. Controllers can go loopy and mangle both sets of data, viruses can get in and kill the data, power supplies can overvolt, things burst into flames, burglars run off with the machine (you get the idea).

Just get a cheap 300GB external USB2 drive, plug it into the local machine, copy stuff over. Then lock it up in a different part of the house, or better still someone else's house.

I've already got a maxtor USB external - but with four machines, three mac, one windows and increasingly large quantities of image and music files (which I'd like to serve from one location), you can see how the network option is increasingly attractive, especially considering the house is fully wired.

[Miles_stylus]

L

I will as soon as I get it up and running (which will need a new PC I think).

However my understanding is that the software that comes with it can
1) spot what has changed on machines and back it up without prompting
2) handle multiple cuncurrent backup jobs
3) save specified date (don't know if this is everything in given folders) to different places, including to secure hosted locations on the net for off site backup

In time I intend to use the 1Tb item for a centrallised store / backup and another devise linked to the network in a discrete way (wireless or hidden wires) and stored behind pannelling somewhere in the house to secure key data from burglers etc.

We will have to see...

Miles

[rsvmilly]

I use one of these Buffalo Terrastations at work. It sits on out network, requires no client PC software and seems really good. It has an inbuilt FTP server which I use for collecting webcam images from building sites.

Essentially, it is like a self contained mini-server.

When you factor in that lots of these NAS devices require you to buy the HDs separately, it seems very good value, too.