Reliable, secure and expandable storage solution?

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Trifid

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Hello.

The time has come again to increase my storage capacity and I am reviewing my options.

At the moment the disks I have that are of usable size:
2x 250GB WD SATAII drives (bought when SATAII first came out)
2x Samsung F1 1TB

I would like to move to a RAID1 on my OS which I currently have on a 150GB partition. Should I use my 2 250's? on would I benefit from buying 2x 320GB drives (single platter) - may spend the extra on 2x 500GB single platter disks.

Now, the obvious choice for data is to get a couple more 1TB drives and a controller with inbuilt parity chip for RAID 5. Unfortunately this is not a expandable solution and I don't really need the redundancy. I also have concerns about how secure RAID5 is on the desktop.

(Nightly shutdowns and the rebuild time will be huge quite large on a storage array this size if a drive does fail. Moving the disks from PC to PC may result in losing all the data if the storage controller forgets the RAID setup and lets not forget if the RAID controller dies, which is very likely if I use a controller that is designed for high airflow 1/2u servers.)


So here I am. I've not set a budget as I would like to see people ideas on this and will judge them on individual merit and their associated costs. I'm unlikely to spend more than £500 on it though. :p

Thanks. :)
 
I have gone RAID1 via an Adaptec RAID Controller. The advantage there is that I don't have my data put across a few drives as you have in RAID5. So if some bad happens, you can still access the data on the single drive.

I've currently have a Adaptec - Adaptec SATA II RAID 1220SA. However it only has 2 channels.
If I get around to filling up my current 1Tb Drive that is in RAID1, I will be looking at the difference between replacing my 1Tb Drives with 2Tb Drives appose to purchasing at Adaptec - Adaptec Serial ATA II RAID 1430SA and possibly set up a RAID10 or 2x RAID1

Problem with RAID 5 controllers are that they are expensive. Looking at Adaptec website, i can pick up a Adaptec Serial ATA II RAID 1430SA for $125. RAID 0,1,10.
As for a Adaptec Serial ATA II RAID 2820SA (RAID 0,1,5,10) will be setting me back $525. For that money, I can pick up a Adaptec Serial ATA II RAID 1430SA and 4x 1Tb Hard Drives and then run either 2x RAID1 or 1x RAID10

Now, the obvious choice for data is to get a couple more 1TB drives and a controller with inbuilt parity chip for RAID 5. Unfortunately this is not a expandable solution and I don't really need the redundancy. I also have concerns about how secure RAID5 is on the desktop.

Problem in your logic is that RAID is all about Redundancy. RAID is not a back up solution. It's just there was redundancy just in case one of your hard drives dies. It does not prevent things like virus, data corruption and accidental deletion.
 
I'm not too bothered about virus/accidental deletion. The storage will be on a Linux box with read only access to the files. Obviously data corruption exists.

I was speaking to a member of the server team yesterday about storage and he agrees that RAID is not suitable for home and really requires a separate storage method that is not RAID. I think the best move would be to buy 2 1.5TB HDD, and have a 1TB and a 1.5TB in my PC and the same again in my Linux box and do daily backups. and keep of buying 2x of every cost vs storage vs size drives.
 
I'm not too bothered about virus/accidental deletion. The storage will be on a Linux box with read only access to the files. Obviously data corruption exists.

I was speaking to a member of the server team yesterday about storage and he agrees that RAID is not suitable for home and really requires a separate storage method that is not RAID. I think the best move would be to buy 2 1.5TB HDD, and have a 1TB and a 1.5TB in my PC and the same again in my Linux box and do daily backups. and keep of buying 2x of every cost vs storage vs size drives.

I don't know much about all this, but would a NAS be a good solution for you? I have a Linksys NAS200, that I just bought, and threw a 1TB WD Caviar Green drive into it. Once I get another drive, I'll mirror them, which seems to be a good solution for saving family photos. I haven't done much with this setup, but I do see it has being one of the safest alternatives. Quite a price tag depending on what you do with it.
 
Unfortunately it does not offer enough HDD bays for the expandable storage solution. Access is not really a problem either.
 
I would get the two additional 1TB drives, put them in RAID 5 and move the operating system into a RAID 1 between the 250GB drives as you initially thought (or if we are talking about a desktop and a server I would put a 250GB in the desktop and the other in the server, put the operating systems on these and build the array in the server). It isn't an expandable solution if you get a controller with only 4 channels (I know it gets expensive at this point, but really, there is no magic bullet).

I don't know what the problem is with nightly shutdowns but regarding the rebuild times, yes they will be long but you can use the data while it is rebuilding and the alternative is to restore from backup which could also take a long time.
 
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