[Help] Hard Drive Recommendations

[bronan]

There are better solutions than duplicating data. All hard drives will die, its just a matter of when. A common example setup for a modern "raid" system that assumes this would be:

Good redundancy (1 parity drive):

3 Hard Disk Drives - 4TB each. 1 HDD is used for parity. 8TB of total usable space - any ONE of the 3 drives can die and the pool still functions as normal.

Better redundancy (2 parity drives):

4 Hard Disk Drives - 4TB each. 2 HDD are used for parity. 8TB of total usable space - any TWO of the 4 drives can die and the pool still functions as normal.

Where 2 parity drives comes in handy is if you lose a hard drive, and plug in a new one to restore it, it will heavily read the other drives parity to rebuild it. If you buy drives in lots, its not unheard of to have a couple go down back to back, so its an extra layer of protection.

[Stamper]

Thanks, yes, I'm thinking of building a raid system, that might be more sensible in the future. Now the Mega solution, of buying 20tb of space a month, also can help preserving files. The main problem, as you probably have figured it, is that forum projects take up the most of all this data.

[Yarp]

Thanks, yes, I'm thinking of building a raid system, that might be more sensible in the future. Now the Mega solution, of buying 20tb of space a month, also can help preserving files. The main problem, as you probably have figured it, is that forum projects take up the most of all this data.

16tb as Mega is $32.50/month or almost $400/year...that'll buy you a few 12tb+ HDD every year. You do need toa figure power usage, maintenence etc, but having the data at home is easier and quicker to manage than on the cloud, especially with giant files (granted I only have Xfinity as an option with crap upload speed). I have a cheap-ish Terramaster 5bay NAS but really wanna move to something larger like unraid in a desktop chassis. I'm maxed out at 5x12tb in raid-10 right now.

[Stamper]

I'll look into that, but I don't need storage that is wired 24/24. I just need stockage I can pull when necessary.
Plus, in case of say, a burglary, you know the thieves will get anything that is computer and hard drive.
Or let's say the building burn!
Having an extra copy in a cloud is costly, but then your data is still out there to retrieve, vs being lost.
We never know!

[stwd4nder2]

as you probably have figured it, is that forum projects take up the most of all this data.

shame there's no one dedicated to archiving these things

[bronan]

I'll look into that, but I don't need storage that is wired 24/24. I just need stockage I can pull when necessary.
Plus, in case of say, a burglary, you know the thieves will get anything that is computer and hard drive.
Or let's say the building burn!
Having an extra copy in a cloud is costly, but then your data is still out there to retrieve, vs being lost.
We never know!

I will be the millionth person on the internet to say that RAID is for redundancy, not backup. The idea is that you aren't counting on a single drive to keep your data accessible. You should still take backups, preferably keeping one offsite, in a safe, in the cloud or all of the above.

Also for anyone interested, classic hardware RAID is dead. The hard drives stopped supporting the features that are required so the systems that Synology, TrueNAS, Unraid, etc. use get around this by having the OS do the parity and redundancy logic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l55GfAwa8RIj

[Stamper]

shame there's no one dedicated to archiving these things

As others, I only keep the films project that matters to me, but usually, divided between everyone, one project always can be recovered even when the original maker lost it in a drive crash.