Media RAID servers. Anyone here familiar with them?

[Arkitech]

I have an external WD 3tb drive that I bought only a few months ago that's starting to go bad. I'm fed up with losing data, replacing drives, etc. So I've decided I want to build a dedicated media server w/RAID. I'm curious what type of setups you guys have.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

See sig.

Even with a fancy server, you still need to back it up. I use Crashplan for that.

 

[Anteaus]

Yeah, RAID isn't a backup, it's designed for uptime. No matter where you serve your data from, you need another copy to count as a proper backup. You think losing a drive is annoying, try a failed RAID array. My opinion is to stay with individual drives unless you need large amounts of contiguous space that go beyond reasonable single drive capacities.

My reasoning is this:

If you have 4 2TB hard drives in a RAID 5 array, you only have 6TB of storage. Also, when the array runs, all four drives must operate, adding wear and tear to all drives.

If you have 4 2TB hard drives running as individual drives, you have 8TB of storage. Since only the drive being used is spinning, energy savings are much higher and wear and tear is limited to more often used drives.

There are advocates here for both RAID and non-RAID solutions, so definitely look into both. My own media server contains 3 4TB drives, each with a matching 4TB external drive for backup purposes. Easy enough to add more drives.

Good luck!

 

[red454]

I use an external USB 3.0 3TB for the first stage of backup, then everything on that drive gets backed up to another 3TB on a NAS computer that uses FreeNAS. I love it and I can easily keep both back ups synchronized and separate. The NAS system is of course accessible to all 4 of my home computers.