Big external storage

Verponian

Verponian

Verponian

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3 Mar 2012
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246
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South Yorkshire
I'm looking to beef up my external storage so I can consolidate my poorly organised media collection that's currently spanning several external drives into one big collection. I'm thinking about some kind of RAID 5 enclosure so I can have plenty of space and a level of redundancy.

I've narrowed it down to either a Drobo 5D or an enclosure like the Lian Li EX-503.

The Drobo is hideously expensive. I like the flexibility of expansion options and the thunderbolt connection would come in handy. Plus my lack of experience with RAID makes the apparent simplicity of it pretty attractive. On the other hand I really don't like the fact that if the drobo fails, my data would effectively hostage due to the proprietary beyondRAID software and the short warranty doesn't fill me with the confidence.

I figure a good RAID enclosure would be better and the Lian Li 503 looks okay, certainly cheaper than a Drobo. I'm completely new to RAID though so I'm a bit daunted and worried about where I'd stand if the enclosure did fail and how easy it would be for me to get stuff back.

I'm open to any suggestions. I'd discounted NAS or a media server because I just don't think I need one. I'm not looking to stream stuff around the house, everything is in one room. Nor am I after constant access, I want to be able to turn this off when not in use and just have it as pure storage.
 
I don't really consider RAID as the ultimate redundancy solution personally - its a convenient way to minimise disruption and downtime and an extra layer of protection against data loss - but my NAS setup for redundancy has the internal 2 disc mirrored RAID being realtime replicated to an external USB HDD that has plain old NTFS format. (I also snapshot critical files via the USB Copy port on the front from time to time also just incase of stuff like cryptolocker so as to have an offline copy).

Depending on your needs a 2-4 bay synology or qnap could be an option (wouldn't discount them too quickly).

EDIT: My storage requirements for backup, etc. fits in 500GB with space to spare though so its a different ball game to if you require multiple TBs of storage.
 
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To expand on the above, RAID was really designed with enterprise in mind, it's a particular area i work in. We create storage solutions from 4Tb raw, upto about a 1Pb, and the RAID cards used in these systems are very pricey.

It sounds like all you want is a single pool for storing your media on. Ideally you'd want to back your media up to additional hdd's, as remember RAID isn't a backup solution. This is the route i've taken, i have about 7Tb (4,1.5,1.5) and my important media is backed up on some older 1tb drives. The redundancy isn't really needed, i'm not hosting a streaming service to say a dozen users.
 
I have a Synology ds414. Currently with a single 6tb drive in it. On another machine which stays off most of the time, it has a copy of that data. And it's also on some external drives.

Synology is easy to expand, you just add a drive and wait for the synology to expand the volume and allocate the data on the new drives.

Expensive outlay, but a great product.

Very low power usage
 
Thanks for the replies, they're really helpful. I understand what people are saying about not treating RAID as the ultimate backup solution. I think basically what I've done is seen the potential storage space I could get from a RAID setup then willfully misinterpreted the redundancy capabilities of a RAID 5 to see it as the ultimate win-win and maybe got a bit carried away.

Just as a little explanation, I recently suffered a drive failure which wasn't particularly disastrous but made me realise I've been very lucky thus far and maybe I'd gotten a bit complacent. I currently have about 6TB of external storage, the bulk of which is on a single 4TB external drive. This houses the bulk of my stuff and I've gotten a little worried that I don't really have much of it backed up. It's not that stuff couldn't be replaced, just it'd be a massive pain to do so.

To be fair, I'm not close to filling that 6TB up but I've been thinking of expanding my HDD based media collection for a while (far too many DVD cases taking up precious space etc) and having storage that can either handle it or at least be relatively easily expanded to store it is pretty attractive.

I'll consider NAS some more. It does seem silly that while I might be okay with direct storage right now, if I'm going down the line of having media on HDD that I wouldn't ultimately want to be able to stream it over a home network. I'm just keen that whatever NAS I find also have decent direct attachment options rather than solely network based.

What I suppose I could do as a stop gap is pick up a couple enclosures, and maybe 3 big HDDs, use 2 in the enclosures and the other as a periodic backup of those drives. That way if I ever do decide to set up a RAID, I have some disks to start with.
 
You could take a look at some software 'RAID' like services such as DrivePool or FlexRAID. I'm considering both of those solutions at the moment.
 
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