Do u need a nas or just more drives?

[BigChobbs]

I have an 8tb seagate baracuda at the moment as my main storage drive, its very new so im not concerned about failure anytime soon (fingerd crossed), though it doesnt have any redundency.

 

My need is simply more storage, and i thought of a nas, but they seem very expensive, and building one also seems too expensive for my use case as well.

 

I have about 1.6tb free on that drive, i would like to double total capacity to 16tb, with redundency as well. All i need is more space, i dont need to access my files while out and about. Its mainly movie and tv shows ripped from bluray at full quality, no reencoding. I just move the stuff i want to watch or what i may want to watch to a 2tb external hdd i have connected directly to my tv.

 

Nas drives seem quite a bit more expensive, and i dont want to spend a whole load more money on the convenience of not needing to shuffle files around if i want to watch them, 2tb is plenty for many movies and even full series taking 100s of gb, so it itsnt a massive inconvenience, nor is not being able to stream them on the go. If i want to watch it on my phone, i simply reencode with handbrake using nvenc, so its super snappy.

 

What would u recommend?

[Enderman]

Motherboards have 4-8 sata 3 ports so you have plenty of room to add a few more drives.

8-12TB drives aren't that expensive so I would just do that.

[TrigrH]

If its just for storing movies. you could get a HDD caddy, number every drive and once its full catalog whats on it in a file on your PC and only plug it in externally when you need it?

[BigChobbs]

33 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

If its just for storing movies. you could get a HDD caddy, number every drive and once its full catalog whats on it in a file on your PC and only plug it in externally when you need it?

Like a hard drive dock kind of thing? If thats what u mean i thought about that shortly after posting, but 3.5 inch drives are too big for me to physically store them and 2.5 inch drives are more expensive, but ill see what i can do.

[BigChobbs]

39 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Motherboards have 4-8 sata 3 ports so you have plenty of room to add a few more drives.

8-12TB drives aren't that expensive so I would just do that.

I have no more space inside the case, only 3 trays, though theres no reason i couldnt replace one of the two 1tb drives i have. What about redundency?

[Enderman]

5 minutes ago, BigChobbs said:

I have no more space inside the case, only 3 trays, though theres no reason i couldnt replace one of the two 1tb drives i have. What about redundency?

Yeah I would replace the small drives with one large one.

 

Is it really sensitive data that you can't afford to lose?

If it's just movies and stuff that can be redownloaded I wouldn't worry about it, hard drives last many years.

 

You can use tools like crystaldiskinfo to check the smart data and see when one is starting to have problems that could indicate imminent failure.

It's very rare for them to just outright die with no warning.

[BigChobbs]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Yeah I would replace the small drives with one large one.

 

Is it really sensitive data that you can't afford to lose?

If it's just movies and stuff that can be redownloaded I wouldn't worry about it, hard drives last many years.

 

You can use tools like crystaldiskinfo to check the smart data and see when one is starting to have problems that could indicate imminent failure.

It's very rare for them to just outright die with no warning.

While it wouldnt be the end of the world if i lost it, it would be a nightmare to re rip everything.

[TrigrH]

11 minutes ago, BigChobbs said:

Like a hard drive dock kind of thing? If thats what u mean i thought about that shortly after posting, but 3.5 inch drives are too big for me to physically store them and 2.5 inch drives are more expensive, but ill see what i can do.

Yes a dock, a couple HDDs does not take up a lot of space, you could probs place them inside your pc if you needed. You would need redundancy for movie drives that are used as cold storage.

[Enderman]

9 minutes ago, BigChobbs said:

While it wouldnt be the end of the world if i lost it, it would be a nightmare to re rip everything.

You could spend a bit more money to get a third 8TB drive and do raid 5, so if one drive fails you won't lose any data and you can rebuild the array.

https://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/

 

Get rid of those 1TB drives and sell them on craigslist or something for a bit of extra money.

[BigChobbs]

6 minutes ago, Enderman said:

You could spend a bit more money to get a third 8TB drive and do raid 5, so if one drive fails you won't lose any data and you can rebuild the array.

https://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/

 

Get rid of those 1TB drives and sell them on craigslist or something for a bit of extra money.

this sounds like a good solution, however, im not familiar with raid. I did a quick search and found this https://pureinfotech.com/setup-raid-5-windows-10/ would this be how I should do it? do I need specific drives, or will regular drives work, as im not sharing files on the network, or leaving my pc running 24/7, and will I lose all the data due to formatting when I do it?

 

[Enderman]

3 minutes ago, BigChobbs said:

this sounds like a good solution, however, im not familiar with raid. I did a quick search and found this https://pureinfotech.com/setup-raid-5-windows-10/ would this be how I should do it? do I need specific drives, or will regular drives work, as im not sharing files on the network, or leaving my pc running 24/7, and will I lose all the data due to formatting when I do it?

 

There are different ways to do it, software raid is done from the OS, hardware raid is done from your motherboard bios or with a raid card.

I haven't done it before so I can't make exact recommendations, but yes regular drives will work fine.

[doommood]

On 6/3/2020 at 3:29 AM, BigChobbs said:

this sounds like a good solution, however, im not familiar with raid. I did a quick search and found this https://pureinfotech.com/setup-raid-5-windows-10/ would this be how I should do it? do I need specific drives, or will regular drives work, as im not sharing files on the network, or leaving my pc running 24/7, and will I lose all the data due to formatting when I do it?

 

RAID 5 indeed is a good solution if you need more capacity. But in terms of redundancy and reliability, I suggest you not use RAID 5 with HDDs. Having 16TB drives you will gain the performance of two drives on reading operations and a single drive on write ones. For 32TB capacity and 3 drives RAID, it is very slow performance. In case of a drive failure, RAID 5 becomes unreliable. During the rebuild, your changes are high to face another drive failure. A possible issue is Unrecoverable Read Errors (URE). See this post https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/raid-5-was-great-until-high-capacity-hdds-came-into-play-but-ssds-restored-its-former-glory-2. 

 

Consider using software RAID like ZFS. It allows us to set up RAIDZ that has the same capacity of two drives. Its performance is slightly better. More important RAIDZ minimizes chances to lose another HDD on RAID rebuild. Despite hardware RAID, software-based RAIDZ synchronizes only data that is actually written to storage, while RAID 5 rebuild writes actual data and unnecessary "zeros". https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html  

For instance, ZFS is available on Linux so you can use Ubuntu or any other distribution you like to create your ZFS storage pool.