Safest option for storage of movies ?

nightrider1470

nightrider1470

nightrider1470

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I have a drobo, not liking it that much though as its not the safest option, one error and your having to reformat all the time.

Any way......... Whats the safest option for stoage of all my movies and camcorder footage of around 12TB ? for under £300-£500

:)
 
I assume you have HDD's to re-use?

12TB worth of HDDs will currently cost you around £600 and you'll need more than that if you want a RAID setup with redundancy.

Plus off course you should also have a backup of the 12TB because no setup, even with redundancy, is infallible.
 
Is a proportion of the material movies e.g. Iron Man, Ghost, Goonies?

If so why bother to back those up you can download them over and over for free.

Perhaps you only need to back up material that is irreplaceable like your camcorder footage.
 
If you have 12 x (1Tb) drives, then you'll most likely need a server board and controller card. Most of the desktop motherboards nowadays come with 10 or under sata ports. Bear in mind they also have multiple embedded RAID controllers so AFAIK you couldn't set up a 12 disk RAID across 2/3 controllers. You'd have to have multiple arrays set up.

I think you might struggle to build something with a 12 disk array for under £500.


Just noticed that my motherboard has 12 sata ports (10 sata + 2 esata) but it's spread over 4 controllers. I'm pretty certain I couldn't create a 12 disk array over 4 controllers.
 
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You could in Windows with dynamic disks and create a RAID5. I wouldn't trust my data to it though.

Windows Home Server 1 will allow disk pooling and duplication of selected folders.

...and there's the new Storage Pool feature in Windows 8/8 Server.

Is it important to the OP to see it as a single drive/pool though? If it's just to keep 12TB data safe, then have a 12TB backup box for it, preferrably offsite - and forget all about RAID/pooling.
 
I looked into this a while back and came to the below conclusion:

If you care about the data, then you'll want to duplicate it on another (set of) drive(s). The cheapest safe way would be to have matched pairs of drives and software to mirror each drive every night/once a week not using any RAID.
 
If you only want a place to store them, and your not bothered about streaming capability, why not put them up to the cloud?

Unlimited storage will be dirt cheap so long as you don't need any extra functionality. Let someone else take the hit on power, backups, hdd costs

livedrive.com ?
 
12 TB :-O< ive got about 500gb of movies, stored on a 1 TB Seagate, using it a few years now, but sorry I cant help with 12TB
 
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If you happen to have an internet connection with very decent upload (>10MBit) then online storage (eg. with livedrive) is probably a good bet. Offline storage is the only way to protects against a burglary...

In terms of local storage, software RAID5 on Linux is probably your best bet - you can mix and match SATA ports across any controllers, and any low-end PC with budget SATA controllers will do.
 
Put them all on VHS and put them in the covers that look likes books. Have a huge book shelf taking up half your house.
 
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