Thinking of restructuring my home server

Martynt74

Martynt74

Martynt74

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20 Feb 2004
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Hondon de las Nieves, Spain
At the moment i have a home server consisting of an AMD Fusion E-450 mini ITX board with 4gb ram (possibly 8gb i'm not sure) and a little pico psu.

The motherboard has 5 SATA ports which was the main selling point since i was going mini ITX and most have a lot less!

Inside i have a 120gb SSD which holds WHS 2011 and 4 2tb hard drives, these are a mixture of 3x Samsung drives and 1 WD Red.

These are split to 2x Movies, 1x Music and documents/pictures and then another for TV Shows.

The TV Shows drive was filling up so i put another 2tb drive in which i had spare and connected this to the external eSata port and fed the cable through into the case to the hard drive.

I have no back up set at the moment which is monumentally stupid. Although i do have 2 spare 2tb drives knocking around.

I've been trying to debate the possible solutions recently and would appreciate some advice.

Option 1

Buy a 4 bay external dock, fill this with hard drives and back up the existing drives onto these. Probably the cheapest option however these docks aren't cheap!

Option 2

Move the HTPC from the front room into Server position as it's considerably more powerful (Intel I3 3225) and then buy 2 of the above external bays fill both with hard drives and use one for normal storage and the other for back up

Option 3

Change the existing 2tb drives in the server to 6tb drives, use some as storage and the others as backup

Option 4

????


Anyone have any good advice? I think option 1 might be the best situation for the time being and the others are just me wanting to splurge!
 
Having the backups in the same chassis as the data you're backing up will be fine for a simple Hard disk failure. For almost anything else, power surge, fire, etc it's of practically no use.

You'd be better off using an online backup solution, like backblaze or similar. Though I'd probably only do your personal data like photos and documents, everything else could be replaced.
 
Do you really need to backup and keep all the TV shows and movies?

MY HTPC was running out of space, I had to keep deleting videos to make room for more. Was easier to delete watch I watched and have a regular purge of stuff I'll never get around to watching. If available on Netflix or Amazon not worth keeping a local copy.

So the only thing I really needed to backup was music, photos and documents.

Music was all backed up to Google Music. Photos and Documents to Google Drive.

No I can access all my important files from anywhere I have internet access and the reset I learned to stop worrying about.
 
I agree that i don't have to backup it at all really. It's just handy to avoid having to redo a lot of things. Music wise i've got around 1300 cd's so ripping all those is gonna take a huge amount of time.

With both myself and the wife and kids we tend to all watch different things at different times so would've preferred to avoid deleting things as they're watched (i'm also one to rewatch films quite often)

For the sake of a couple hundred quid it seemed logical to just do something to give myself a bit of piece of mind.
 
Then I'd still go with an online backup solution for your personal stuff. Explaining to the missus that she can't watch Titanic again is way easier than explaining that all the photos from the kids birthdays and Christmases are gone.

Everything else you could copy to external drives or even write to Bluray or DVDs, and stash them somewhere else, preferably in a small media safe.
 
You'll also have to keep an eye on the power consumption when adding more hard drives. PicoPSUs are typically around 90 to 120W.

I've started using 2TB 2.5" drives (~£70). Can fit more into my mATX case, less power and noise.
 
Yeah, i've got a power meter connected to it and it only uses 65W even when streaming to 2 devices so i think i've got a bit to go yet :)

My Pico is one of the beasty 150w ones to :)

Interesting on the 2.5" drives though, didnt know they'd come down that cheap.
 
Ah i just typed C2750 and assumed that the gigabyte was the one.

Thats a cracking board and would do me perfectly. Wonder how it would handle plex.
 
Marvt74 said:
Ah i just typed C2750 and assumed that the gigabyte was the one.

Thats a cracking board and would do me perfectly. Wonder how it would handle plex.
Click to expand...

It cost around £250 - £300 once landed in the uk. Abit expensive but you save money on power and would not need invest in a external solution. At most you need a case that supports all the hard drives you need. You do get a 8 core CPU :D

Other note, I am not sure if you need ECC Memory or not as it is server grade. Website has non-ecc and ecc supported Memory.

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C2750D4I#Memory QVL

I was tempted to use one for a VM Lab in a 1u case.
 
One of your mistakes is not going for a drive pooling setup such as StableBit DrivePool. This gives you the most flexibility with your existing drives, and an easy way to swap out drives with higher capacity ones.

This will also give you the ability to have redundancy (not a backup!) on your "critical" folders - in my case, this is documents and photos, where I have copies on multiple disks (to protect from disk failure), everything else is only on a single disk, as I can always re-rip CDs if need be.
 
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