The cost of storage hit a low the last time it was time for a storage upgrade. Then prices shot through the roof after a flood in Thailand closed factories.
This shut down all of my hard drives purchases for over two years. When I emerged from my cocoon, Samsung was gone as a Hard Drive manufacturer…and I had bought many Samsung OEM hard drives.
The purpose of RAID in a redundant system is to protect against hardware failure. You have different levels of RAID for this, RAID 1 for just a straight mirror, and RAID 5 and 6, which involve a minimum of 3-4 drives to accomplish.
RAID is important if you care about uptime. If you can afford to be down for a bit, backups are a better choice.
What is being stored, in this case, consists of several categories: Video, Music, Documents, Configuration Files. There is no point in storing complete drive images. The OS can be reinstalled, and it probably will be better off and cleaner running after it is. The OS drive on all of the systems I’ve built or refurbed in the last two years is an SSD, which is a common practice nowadays.
I had been mulling this after reading an article on another hardware refresh by Adam Williamson. He hadn’t refreshed in seven and a half years and used a separate NAS and server. So, why refresh after only two and a half years? Partly it was due to mistakes.
I’d been using WD Green drives. These had several limitations. They park the head after only 8 seconds of inactivity, which increased the load cycle count. The WD Red Drive is designed for 24/7 operation in network attached storage, with a longer warranty, and I now have two 3TB drives. The only other alternative in WD’s stable was a Black drive, their performance drive. It might be time to consider a Seagate, the main competitor, as well.
The warranty situation in hard drives now continues to drop. Five years, down to thee, and down to two years. So there is less protection from the manufacturer and less inclination to create quality products. That was why we were buying OEM over Consumer Drives over the last few years.
Back to the subject at hand…why not a RAID? It is simply a matter of cost vs. benefit. This is terabytes of video data, mostly a DVD archive I intend to create by backing up my DVD collection to MKV. If it were lost, the original copies aren’t going anywhere. But, more importantly, cloud backup is impractical.
Using Amazon S3, for example, at a rate of 9.5 cents a GB, that is just under $100 a month per TB. Amazon Glacier, which is their long-term backup option, is 1 cent a GB, or roughly $10 a TB. But once you take video out of the equation, or sharply reduce it, budgeting $5 a month for important data is a reasonable amount, and still gets you a lot of storage options to work with.
So, to ensure redundancy, there is a second drive in the system, and backups will be done to it. From there, the backups of everything but the video store will be sent up to the cloud. As I’ve mostly given up buying DVDs(due to Blu-Ray), the collection should be fairly static.
Back to Adam Williamson, he had a great idea of having the other computers on the network back up their data to the server, independently isolated by each machine having a separate user account on the server. Not quite there yet, but sounds good. I have other plans to download data from my cloud service providers(Google, Dropbox, etc., and maintain a local backup, but that is a longer-term project. I’m reasonably certain in the interim, Google has a better backup system then I do.
What about off-site then? I still have the old 1TB Green Drives. They can be run through diagnostics, loaded up as a backup, and sent off to a relative’s house…I’ve added a hard drive dock through an E-SATA port to support this.
So in the end, RAID wasn’t necessary for me, but some redundancy was. It may be for you. Comments?
More to come…
Related articles
Why you shouldn’t backup to an internal hard drive(pcworld.com)
The Best External Hard Drives for Backing Up Your Computer Files(thetechscoop.net)
Data Backup: Cloud Computing vs. On-Site Options(staples.com)
First off, I personally wouldn’t touch WD drives with a 10′ pole. They are too expensive to recover in event of catastrophic failure… often 2-3x the cost of data recovery vs. Seagate due to the way their spindles are affixed. So next point is that RAID != Backup, and vice versa. RAID reduces downtime. Backup ensures the integrity of your backup. If a single drive failed, you wouldn’t want to have to download your whole backup to recover. That’d cost a lot, and would be a huge waste of time. So we RAID our storage servers to avoid any downtime (a drive fails, you replace it and all is still running, without having to resort to our backups). But then, if a surge hits taking out all your drives, or a flood wipes out your server, THAT is when your backup comes into play. Personally, I have an unRAID server with 4 TB space on-site, and a 2TB external hard drive connected to a Pogoplug off-site. My unRAID server backs up to it (rsync) nightly. It’s the best protection I can get for next-to-nothing. I wouldn’t do AWS-based backup due to the same reason it’s impractical to you: the cost. Just find a friend or family member that’ll host a Pogoplug in a closet somewhere across town, and automate everything.
I loved Samsung OEM drives. They unfortunately are gone. I’m not quite ready to adopt Seagate. I had issues back in the day.
We are in agreement about offline. I only do AWS for configuration files, and database backups….so only 1-2GB a month, which is manageable.
It is again, the video I want to have redundancy on, but not in a RAID. Since the second drive is in the system, I can just put it into operation by changing the mountpoints, and go back to business, same as a RAID, which is fine for my use.
It is always function that dictates these things.
Since Video is the “big” concern (pun intended), I would instead take the approach of RAID for local storage (for the reasons outlined above) and then a single External hard drive backup run, stored physically off-site. For example… how often do the videos change, and how much would be lost per month in catastrophic failure? So if you have, for example, 500 GB of video now, back all 500 GB up to an external drive and store it somewhere physically elsewhere (a safety deposit box is ideal. Family member’s house is also a good option). Then, if you ever have a huge failure on the RAID, all you lose is what you have stored since that copy. But get in the routine of running new files to that drive any time they become critical. Might be once a month… take a Saturday trip to get the drive and copy over all files you’ve created since the last backup. Then, use the standard off-site backup for your other files (much smaller than video files).
I’m in agreement. I just think a nightly rsync will be less wearing than a RAID 1
Hi Guru & Robbie,
Well let’s not forget that RAID isn’t a “backup” but redundancy, what I do with my server (hardware RAID1 with redundant drive) is to do daily incremental backups and because I’ve only got a relatively low amount of data in my case I can get away with a weeklydump to DVD and an exteexternal hard drive.