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External harddrive or RAID 5 enclosure....

C

conjur2

Junior Member
I built an HTPC a few years back. SSD for the OS and striped 2 TB drives for all the movies, digital photos, camcorder videos, Windows Media Center DVR'd shows, etc.

Been having some odd behaviour w/one of the striped drives and keeping the photos/videos backed up but would loathe having to re-rip hundreds of DVDs and BluRays.

Sooo...been thinking of a RAID 5 enclosure or maybe just a larger external back up drive. USB 3.0 would be fine for movie/video playback but drives that like that aren't really meant to be used in that capacity, eh?

Just wondering if I should just bite the bullet and pay out the funds for the RAID 5 setup.
 
For a good backup, the external that only runs when needed is your best bet. RAID is for minimizing diwntime, but should not be used for backup purposes.
 
ketchup79 said:
For a good backup, the external that only runs when needed is your best bet. RAID is for minimizing diwntime, but should not be used for backup purposes.
Click to expand...

Yeah...I have a separate backup device for all my images, personal videos, documents, etc.

Just curious if an additional backup device, one with larger capacity, would be sufficient for hosting ripped DVDs (from my personal collection now all boxed up so I don't want to re-rip them! 🙂 ) and such. Or would that much usage not be good for an external backup drive and better relegated to a RAID 5 solution?
 
If it's going to be production (actually hosting copies of data computers are actively using), that doesn't count as a backup. RAID can greatly complicate recovery options in a hard fail situation (where the RAID breaks). At this point of drive capacity, I wouldn't be using any RAID unless you can fill a 6TB drive with backups. If you go RAID 5 for a backup, you'll be relying on that RAID to be intact when you need it most. I like Buffalo Stations, but we've also had to replace a lot of them for failed mainboards at our SMB customers that use them. They just don't like 24x7. The bigger TerraStations (rackmount and the like) are much more robust though.
 
Gotcha. For 24x7 with some extra fault tolerance, I actually do like the RAID 5 idea, since you do have some fault tolerance.
 
An enclosure will probably be well cooled and quiet, while externals can get hot. Some have a fairly loud fan.
 
Thanks, everyone.

Yeah...I'm leaning toward the RAID 5 setup for storing all the data and upgrading my backup drive to a larger capacity to save off stuff that is irreplaceable (and also some of the stuff that I've ripped from my library to save time if I ever had to redo all that again)
 
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