2 x 2TB vs 4 x 1TB

futureal33

futureal33

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Morning all

Looking at buying a NAS drive and have narrowed it down to requiring 4TB. For my available cash, I seem to have two options

A 2 drive system running 2x2TB WD Red drives
or
A 4 drive Buffalo Linkstation Quad Pro system running 4x1TB Seagate drives

I understand RAID1 and RAID 5, and that with the 4x1TB drive system I have the benefit of using RAID5 to give me 3TB of data, rather than 2TB in the RAID1 of the 2x2TB system.... but are there any other benefits to either system?

Dont want to make a mistake and wish I'd bought the other system

Thanks
 
More drives =
  • possibly more noise
  • more chance of single drive failure
  • more space....

Looks like your requirement is 2TB, with redundancy, not 4 ;)
 
neil_g said:
i still dont think thats quite right.. :D its the same chance of a single drive failing but on 4 drives not 2 :D
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In the same way that if you throw 2 dice or 4 dice at the same time, you have a higher chance of a 6 showing when you throw 4 dice than two ;) Higher chance of one drive failure then :p :D

neil_g said:
either way its something not worth worrying about with MTBF figures being a complete finger in the air number.
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Hmm... I always have spares as I have 14 HDDs running here (and almost as many SSDs - which I don't have spares of!!). HDDs fail - I've had a handful fail over the years - and they always go at the most inconvenient time so I do worry about it :geek:
 
What backup system would you guys recommend for roughly 500GB of photos a year, and a requirement to keep the photos 3 years.

I dont fancy a microserver - but would consider pretty much anything else.

At the moment this is what I have at my disposal, apart from internal PC and system drives:

Synology DS110j 2TB NAS
WD Elements 1TB USB 2.0
1TB WD Green SATA drive
500 GB Seagate SATA drive
2 x 500GB IDE drives
 
Cheapest option would be to use Synology as main backup and then duplicate to USB drive overnight. Put 2 or 3TB drive in USB enclosure and sync regularly to Synology - then update USB overnight. Can the Synology do that automatically or do you have to do it via the PC?
 
That is pretty much what I do at the moment, but my main concern is that my Synology also houses my iTunes collection - so the drive sees a lot of activity and use - which I am worried will cause it to fail sooner than if it was purely used as photo backup.

At the moment, my Synology is structured like this

Music - root
Documents - root
Photos - 2011/2012/2013 etc

The Synology has a backup schedule to backup the contents of the Photos directory only to the connected USB drive in the back of the Synology - this happens once a week on a Sunday evening at midnight.

So at that point, I have:

  • 1 x copy (working copy) of the RAWs from 2013 weddings on my internal PC D drive (1TB SATA) - which backs up daily to the Synology
  • 1 x duplicate copy of this on my Synology drive under 2013 (2011 and 2012 are also there, but I only sync 2013 folder) - which is updated daily with any changes from the internal PC drive
  • A weekly backup of photos from the Synology to the USB drive connected to the back of the Synology (2011, 2012, 2013) as a kind of master backup, or an "all else has failed" type scenario. This USB drive is plugged in constantly to the Synology.

So far this system has been flawless and works great.

My only real concern as stated above, is that the Synology drive (which is my main backup I guess) is also used to house other things too - whereas I feel like I should be keeping my customer's wedding pictures somewhere dedicated.... am I being over cautious?
 
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You probably won't notice it, but there are differences between RAID 1 and RAID 5 in terms of performance.

RAID 1 is usually superior in reading data as, if one disk is busy, it has the option of going to fetch the data from the other disk (if that's not busy). And it only needs to read from one disk - for RAID 5, data has to be read from all "n" disks, as it is striped across them.

Writing data is more marginal, and it depends on how the guts of the RAID systems are designed (e.g. caching for writes with battery backup). Generally, RAID 1 will win again because there are only two disks to write to and there is no parity to be recalculated.

RAID 5 wins on hardware cost.
 
Know what you mean about storing everything on one drive. I have my main backup in my fileserver, but it is on a totally different array to the media. You have a few options:

  • Live with what you have
  • Separate the backup NAS from the "house server" NAS and leave the USB connected to the backup NAS. i.e. add new NAS to add to what you have
  • Move to some form of microserver with a few disks you can configure how you want and use the existing Synology/USB drives as backups of that

If you have a decent internet connection (i.e. fibre), 500G over a year isn't a lot to upload....
 
Andy,

Adding a new NAS to the mix might be the best solution. Im guessing it wouldn't need to be RAID, as it it backed up in two other places anyway (internal PC drive, and USB drive in the back of it).

I would need something around 2TB-3TB

That way I could keep the "house NAS" for all my docs, iTunes etc on my current Synology NAS, and use the new "photo NAS" purely for wedding photos.

I think that would be the more professional approach?

Unfortunately cloud backup is not an option as I am still on less than 2mb broadband!
 
futureal33 said:
That is pretty much what I do at the moment, but my main concern is that my Synology also houses my iTunes collection - so the drive sees a lot of activity and use - which I am worried will cause it to fail sooner than if it was purely used as photo backup
Click to expand...

a few of my HD203WI's are over 3 years old and they serve photos, documents, music and HD video.. as long as you have redundancy and backups i wouldnt worry too much.
 
futureal33 said:
I have the data backed up in 3 locations so maybe I am covered
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Yes, as long as you are happy the one "furthest" from your data is a true representation of your data. You might want to check a few files with something like winmd5: http://www.winmd5.com/ just to check what is backed up is the same as what is on your HDD
 
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