2012-02-25, 06:58 | Link #21 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2007
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As a long-time advocate of burned DVDs, and later Blu-Rays, I've gone optical media-free in the last year. It takes a lot of effort to burn, store, and organize optical disks, even 25GB Blu-Rays. Now, I just use an internal hard drive to store everything, a couple of external drives for backup (and shuttling shows between my desktop and other computers), and I have a batch file to automatically back up everything, so keeping everything backed up and synced is trivial.
Definitely the way to go.
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2012-02-25, 16:29 | Link #23 |
Senior Member
Join Date: May 2006
Location: California
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Since 2007, I've just been using two 4-drive RAID-5 arrays for archiving with a couple additional high-capacity JBOD HDDs for recent storage. Every few years I then do staggered upgrades which often at least double storage for lower cost than I bought the previous HDDs for. Drives formerly in RAID get re-purposed into external enclosures. In general, I've never found doing backups of downloaded stuff as cost efficient, considering most could be re-acquired with a bit of time and effort. Protection against a sudden single-drive failure taking out all my data is all I feel I need at the moment, and my small RAID-5 arrays have worked well enough for that purpose.
Sometime in the future, I could see myself begin using a combination of services like Backblaze ($3.96/month unlimited storage backup single computer, active local data only) and Bitcasa (free in Alpha/Beta, afterwords $10/month unlimited storage multiple computers, active+inactive+deleted local & external data, folder sharing with other users, streaming, w/ access via mounted virtual filesystem or web portal) so I don't need to endlessly expand my local storage and would actually have an off-site backup. I've yet to jump on any such 'cloud backup/storage' service, since when I've considered the cost/benefit of doing so in the past, I often found it would cheaper to just buy HDDs (or use former-RAID drives) and backup myself if needed. Though after prices come down and I migrate to 4TB drives, I'll likely hit my breaking point and embrace one of these unlimited cloud services.
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2012-02-25, 17:07 | Link #24 | |
著述遮断
Join Date: Jul 2009
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2012-02-25, 17:45 | Link #26 |
temporary safeguard
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Germany
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It's not the cheapest NAS around. And stacking it up with 4 hdds will also be costly at the current pricepoint.
I filled mine with 4x2TB for half the price it would cost today. I'd really wait until the hdd prices come down somewhat. Anyway, ever since I got my first one (a 1 bay model) I'm a bit of a Synology fanboy. The one feature that won my heart is an app you can run on your computer, that gives you a little icon on the desktop. The NAS will download anything you drag in there. Downloadlinks from webbrowser, torrents, pictures, whole ftp folders ect. Just throw it all in there, switch off the pc and let the NAS work over night. NAS in general are awesome machines. |
2012-02-26, 11:59 | Link #27 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Pennsylvania
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16 Western Digital 1TB drives in RAID6. I wrote a web frontend to manage and launch all the content that ties into the array. Works great. People worry about corruption and drive failure, but I've been running this since 2007 and only ever had 2 drives go. When one of the drives failed, being RAID6 I had still another drive as a safety net until I was able to get home and replace the failed one. Three drives have to fail before you lose data. Pretty safe IMO, so long as you don't do something boneheaded like store the server in a hot closet lol. For DVD storage, I like this storage rack. PS, in addition to the array as online storage I also have offline storage. The drive in the 5.25 bay there is a Quantum LTO2 Ultrium tape drive. Tapes have a shelf life of 30+ years if stored properly, so it's a very stable medium to use for backups. I need to upgrade though to LTO4, as my LTO2s only hold around 180 GB. I'll probably do that when I build the second server (my 14TB volume currently has 340 GB free lol) |
2012-02-27, 11:26 | Link #29 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Pennsylvania
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Yea, hard drives aren't really a good solution for long term storage unless you plan to keep giving it "health checks" powering it on and such. I use that LTO2 for long term storage, just gotta be sure you store in a controlled environment.
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2012-02-27, 12:13 | Link #31 |
Excessively jovial fellow
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: ISDB-T
Age: 37
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Not really, no. By far the most common failure reason for HDD's is mechanical failure. Usually it's the motor that spins the platters that wears out after a certain number of spin-up cycles, but it can also be caused by the stepper motors that drive the read/write heads wearing out (usually accompanied by various clicking noises) or even a head crash (the read/write heads getting in contact with the rotating platter). If kept unused, a HDD will most likely keep the magnetization of its platters for just about as long as a tape will, i.e. around 25 years if stored properly.
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2012-02-27, 17:06 | Link #32 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Pennsylvania
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2012-02-27, 17:29 | Link #34 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Oct 2004
Age: 35
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TeraGyte? im kidding. i know what you meant. i'd recommend you samsung or western digital for hard drives. i hear hitachi is up there with their 2tb drives but again.. that is all i read on the interwebz. avoid seagate like the plaque.
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2012-02-27, 23:52 | Link #39 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Pennsylvania
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Couldn't resist hehe. I brush several times a day because I tend to try to avoid plaque like the plague |
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2012-02-28, 07:26 | Link #40 | ||
Excessively jovial fellow
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: ISDB-T
Age: 37
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according to some extremely large-scale studies (google, backblaze) the modern deskstars consistently fail significantly less often than any other brand or model (the days of the "deathstar" are long past). for a consumer who only buys one drive and not ten thousand at a time, this is most likely completely irrelevant, but it's nice to be on the side of the big numbers. edit: of course, just buying whatever is cheapest where you are is a completely legit strategy as well, it's not like there is a huge difference between different brands
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