Best products from r/storage

Thanks for these answers, but I guess I didn't make it clear what what needed. Basically their main computer has either a massive SATA drive or just uses external hard drives connected via USB (my guess would be large external hard drives), while the DJ computers are all laptops that have very little data actually stored on them, and pull all songs/videos from the external hard drives that should all be updated weekly, and they have a lot of these external hard drives.

From what you linked those look like great solutions for cloning internal drives but a)I don't think the owners would be comfortable removing the internal drives and b) we're talking about over 4 TB of data and I don't know of many laptops that have that type of internal storage.

If I was reading those products incorrectly please let me know but it seemed like they wouldn't work for a typical external hard drive cloning. Like WD 4TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBU6Y0040BBK-WESN https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0713WPGLL/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_wuiJBb4Z7FANR is the most common way they transport the music to the venues. Then the plug it into the laptop and it's good to go.

> first, the way you described what you want to do with rsync sounds like mirroring would functionally be the same. Can you elaborate on why you think otherwise?

Mirroring is not backup. It does not protect against file deletion, overwriting, data corruption, etc.

If you are this familiar with ZFS then my assumption is that you work in the industry. I urge you to please take this to heart for the sake of your employer, its clients, and your career: Mirroring is not backup.

> Second, just a thought, what are all the disks you want to use? There are other ways to configure ZFS in addition to the varying disk size which may work for you.

At the moment, I have a 3TB and a 2TB drive, to be upgraded when cost is reasonable. My first purchase will probably be a 4TB drive to replace the 2TB drive.

> Third, so give me some ballpark of RAM you thought you needed for ZFS? is 4GB or 8GB unreasonable for you?

That is about exactly as much RAM as I expected to need for ZFS. 4GB might get me by for now, but that's still two to three times the cost of RAM for a cheaper solution. Most Atom motherboards will not support more than 4GB of RAM, though, so there would be no upgrade path.

> My home FreeNAS system (running ZFS) runs on an E3-1200 (IIRC), and it's dead silent, and it's a microATX mobo (and I'm sure you can get smaller for E3's/i3's. I would recommend along these lines.

I'm looking at Atom or ARM based solutions. The scale is completely different, but you'd expect that I could get something smaller for what I'm after.

> What mini-ITX cases are you seeing that are just not good enough? Mind linking me please?

Everything I find that supports at least two 3.5" bays is like
http://www.amazon.com/Silverstone-Tek-Micro-ATX-Mini-ITX-SG09B/dp/B009WXB2TE/
because it is designed to accommodate other parts typical to a general use PC rather than a dedicated NAS. Of course, these are typically $100 or more because they are marketed toward enthusiasts.

What I'm after is closer to
http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-Diskless-Attached-DS214play/dp/B00FWUQNDQ/
Of course it would be a bit bigger because micro-ITX motherboards have a minimum size, but it need not be twice as large in every dimension.

>Also, ZFS is really not that expensive even for a home storage system, so I'm not exactly sure yet why you have a different impression. Mind elaborating if you can?

Disregarding disks and case size, I can build a perfectly reasonable home NAS with an Atom SoC board, cheap case, and minimal amount of RAM for $100 to $150. It will draw 10 to 15 watts of power at peak.

Solutions that cost a multiple of that and draw many times the power are not really in the same ball game. I'd be happy to build one of those big systems for work if there was a need for it, but this is something to go in my house to dump files on.

Honestly this can vary greatly, but I'm able to stomach the risk of a 7TB on my NAS (zfs + snapshots on raid 5 for data protection), but you can get pretty crazy on a low budget, I've considered setting up an IPSec between two sites (mine and a coworkers) and basically replicate my current NAS to a gigabyte brix with something like this in it:

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-Internal-2-5-Inch-ST5000LM000/dp/B01M0AADIX


You can run the tunnel on the cheap with another brix + ethernet dongle and pfsense. Figured that whole "solution" would cost less than a year on the coldest cloud storage, or at least you would see ROI in a few years, heck if the drive goes past 5 years it's really a steal! If you buy a domain name for this, say through godaddy, you can use a public ip identifying service and their API to provide your own dynamic dns updates as well (I do this now with a simple powershell script on task scheduler).


Good luck I hope you find something that works for you!

Drives should last a very long time in cold storage provided they haven't been abused or have already spun for several years. Keep them dry, cool, magnetically shielded, and damped for shock.

I have a pile of 2TB drives of various flavors that reside in cold storage as backups. No issues yet.

I have stuff dating back to 5GB quantums and 10GB WD's that still spin up and read just fine, but most of it is 1TB+ at this point. I kept a few old ones for fun.

Edit: you'll want to use a good storage container like these:

https://www.amazon.com/iDsonix-Professional-Anti-Static-Protection-Moistureproof/dp/B00FDLEFDE/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1484066431&sr=8-5&keywords=3.5+HDD+case

Cost. An OEM licence of Windows Server 2012r2 Essentials (the cheapest thing you can get) is $400.

Though this is /r/storage which is for enterprise storage so that cost should be negligible.

If you have access to Windows Server freely (through education or whatever) or you're just willing to pirate, Windows Server is less buggy than Linux/SAMBA if your primary purpose is serving files to Windows clients from SMB shares. Windows Server also has an NFS implementation that works just fine if you don't want to use SAMBA at all on Linux. The comparable solution to mdraid/zfs/lvm on Linux is Storage Spaces on Windows Server (which is what I work on).

If your front end is largely, say, OS X and iOS devices I would strongly suggest going with Linux/BSD and NFS/ZFS instead.

> 16GB flash drive

Too small for 2012r2. You need 32GB of flash minimum and you're a lot better off with 64GB.

If you're not afraid of used, ITX mobos are around and pretty cheap. The i5 should be great.

Motherboard:

http://www.amazon.com/ASUS-P8H61-I-R2-0-Intel-Motherboard/dp/B00906G97I/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1418650875&sr=1-1&keywords=1155+itx

RAM:

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-PC3-12800-Unbuffered-240-Pin-CT51272BD160B/dp/B006YG9EK6/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1418650912&sr=1-2&keywords=4GB+ECC+DDR3

Case:

http://www.amazon.com/A7879-Mini-ITX-Server-Hot-Swappable-Drive/dp/B00QOCN5XW/ref=sr_1_13?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1418650937&sr=1-13&keywords=itx+case+drives

This comes in well under your £300 budget so long as prices translate from USD to pounds.

A DS414 is almost exactly £300 http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-Diskless-Attached-DS414/dp/B00FWUQY5I/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&qid=1418665579&sr=8-14&keywords=synology


How many bays did you want? You will never get something as integrated and low power as a dedicated NAS appliance. Nor will you have anyone to call for support. I use Synologies from 2 drive guys up to the 2U server appliances at work. They are worth every penny.

Thanks. I could do that, but like I said I'd rather not have to keep the PC powered on all the time.

This would basically just be for DVD rips at the moment. I was looking at this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00LJERU2C?vs=1

And was thinking of using the 1TB drive I have now, and maybe adding a second one at some point in the near future, Whether it's for redundant storage or just extra space.

If I go ahead with this plan, do I have to use two identical HDDs in a 2 bay NAS, or does it not matter?

That's what the USB switch is for. It's basically a glorified way to pull the hard drive out and put it into a new console, sure, but it's still faster and more convenient than doing that. Not sure what you mean about B-ports on the console side though.

But the Xbox already knows what partition is it's own because it's formatted specifically for said Xbox and won't work on any other PC or console. It's how the 360 works when you partition for it. The Wii won't even see the Xbox partitioned segment at all since it's not Fat32. And if I do need more storage for my 360, it has it's own proprietary formatted partition as well that won't be registered or recognized by the Wii or One.

Is the "stick" form factor very important? I'd probably get something like the Samsung T3 if I were in the market. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AVF6UO8

How fast do you want access to be? You're probably going to be best served with a USB drive, but you could also use a network attached device.

Really? I found a Pioneer SSD with 1TB around $90...Do u think this one is good?: https://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-3D-NAND-Internal-SSD/dp/B07KWWFGRX

My main concern is keeping my music, videos & photos safe.

Then this array may be a SAS array instead of fibre channel. I have personally never seen a fiber channel array connected with copper cables, but there are lots of things I haven't seen yet I suppose.

edit: well dip me in grease and call me slippery - apparently Cisco Twinax cables work for Fibre Channel, according to this: https://www.amazon.com/CERTICABLE-SFP-H10GB-CU3M-Passive-Ethernet-Channel/dp/B00KWHNBD4

Has anyone found a good USB3 drive that has a physical write-protect switch? Too many times I find myself wiping a smaller drive just so i can put a file on it for a machine that I can't trust. Kanguru has a few models (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008OGNM9I/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl), and they are fairly expensive. Has anyone run across other drives with this feature?

They are suggesting a $13k price tag for a 13TB SSD using capacity-tier flash on a single 6G SATA channel.

If you spent something like $7100 for 8 x 2TB Samsung SATA SSDs and $600 for a decent 8 port card you'd have >$5k left to spend on a new server enclosure (if needed). In return you'd get 8 times the read performance.

Modern SSDs are already constrained by 6GB I/O channels. Putting this much capacity behind such an interface doesn't seem like a great idea for any workload that would expect performance, when you could accomplish the same thing for less money and much faster throughput with separate devices.