Large Storage Suggestions

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Soldato
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18 Oct 2002
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A guy I do IT work for needs some alternative way or setup for data storage. He has 16 external drives lying around his office which he uses and it looks radiculous. He works with video especially HD now so his storage size is increasing.

Is there some way to easily manage large capacity drives in a nice unit or something which also caters for additional drives in the future?

Having 16+ external drives is a mess and I need to replace any more external purchases with something better.

Cheers.
 
Comes down to cost and actual requirement. If he needs speed, redundancy or neither.
Also what amount of storage does he need? You can get 8TB NAS devices now, if he needs more you can look at external disk packs for Dell/HP servers. Remember when having large disks in a RAID it will take longer to rebuild in the event of a failure. So sure, 6x2TB is great, but the long rebuild time produces larger risk to a second drive failing during rebuild..
 
NAS's from Qnap, Synology or Thecus may be worth looking at (my preference is for Qnap, but I'm sure that there are those on the forums who would recommend the others) - the TS-809 for instance can house 8 2TB disks.

If there isn't a suitable network, you can always just directly connect the NAS to the computer via a suitable network cable.



Matthew
 
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Had a look at the TS-809 which looks nice and would do the job nicely but the bloody price tag throws that option out of the window. Stupid price. Its seems that for every bay, it will cost an extra £100 and then your hard drives after that.

It maybe a mini computer but if it was at a sensible price, I would snap one up.
 
If you want to spend less then go DIY. Very cheap and easy to build a storage server using software RAID 6 under Linux (mdadm) or RAID-Z if you're okay with Solaris. You can add function (and price) by using fibrechannel if GigE isn't quick enough, a hardware RAID controller (Areca are good) and hotswap backplanes.
 
It sounds like a custom case like the Backblaze Storage Pod (45 drives in a custom 4U rackmount chassis :eek:) could be ideal, if you have the skill to build it yourself or the money to get someone to build it for you.
 
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