A Storage Solution

Threebie 3 · 18 Nov 2010 at 12:34

I'm looking for a little advice.

I've been looking at buying a storage solution which will help me to manage the 5TB worth of data I currently have a little better.

At the moment I have 6 HDD's in my computer; I would like to perhaps use a storage solution which will allow me to store these HDD's outside my computer in a caddy or NAS device. In an ideal world, I would then be able to hook this solution up to multiple computer.

I've done a little bit of research, but I've not really found anything suitable in terms of NAS - however I'm not even sure if NAS is the right approach.

Can anybody recommend me a solution, or offer any advice on the subject?

KIA · 18 Nov 2010 at 21:48

You need a NAS although a six bay solution might be a little expensive.

Zarf · 18 Nov 2010 at 23:49

With that amount of data, your best bet is probably going to be a DIY setup using FreeNAS (Or if you are prepared to do get down with a command line, ZFS on OpenIndiana). Pick up an old PC with a decent number of SATA ports, or PCI/PCI-E slots for extra SATA controllers) Something like an AthlonX2 with 2GB RAM is plenty and can be picked up for peanuts second hand, though you'll probably want to put a decent PSU in it and an Intel pro/1000 Gigabit LAN card.

With the price of large hard drives being so low, I'd probably build a RAID10 out of 2TB drives, so you'll need 6 to start off, around £450 for 6TB space (5.457TB usable). Transfer your data over the network and then sell off your current drives (Or if you have the Room in your case and the Spare SATA/Power connectors, and are using ZFS, you could add them into the storage pool)

Alternatively you could do a four drive RAID5, but it's less resilient and what you save on drives you'd lose in performance (unless you bought a hardware RAID controller with parity acceleration).

Threebie 3 · 22 Nov 2010 at 08:55

Thank you for the replies - it's definitely helped to point me in the right direction