Suggestions for Storage/Backing Up

[blueburby1]

Hey all!  I'm fairly new here, not by time but by posting.

Anyways, I've recently started streaming and doing content on youtube and I'm realizing quickly that my current 2X2TB storage drive set up A.  Won't cut it for long with the amount of games, work work, and videos I save to them and B.  I need to start backing things up.

 

So my toss around ideas are, my case is a Meshify C and I'm currently using both 3.5 bays, and 1 2.5 bay (for a 160GB Boot SATA SSD), should i use a NAS in RAID 10 config? around...12 TB or so for now.  Upgrade the internal storage to dual 6 or 8TB drives and have 1 for storage/1 for back up?  upgrade to dual 4TB drives and use either dual 4TB external back ups/1 10 TB External.

I'm basically looking for the best protection and more space, while also looking for cost effectiveness as I've got a budget ceiling around $400 maybe up $500 dollars at this time.

 

Thanks for any suggestions ladies and gents!

[ddennis002]

19 minutes ago, blueburby1 said:

Hey all!  I'm fairly new here, not by time but by posting.

Anyways, I've recently started streaming and doing content on youtube and I'm realizing quickly that my current 2X2TB storage drive set up A.  Won't cut it for long with the amount of games, work work, and videos I save to them and B.  I need to start backing things up.

 

So my toss around ideas are, my case is a Meshify C and I'm currently using both 3.5 bays, and 1 2.5 bay (for a 160GB Boot SATA SSD), should i use a NAS in RAID 10 config? around...12 TB or so for now.  Upgrade the internal storage to dual 6 or 8TB drives and have 1 for storage/1 for back up?  upgrade to dual 4TB drives and use either dual 4TB external back ups/1 10 TB External.

I'm basically looking for the best protection and more space, while also looking for cost effectiveness as I've got a budget ceiling around $400 maybe up $500 dollars at this time.

 

Thanks for any suggestions ladies and gents!

Depending on how complicated you want to get, a simple solution would be 2 big drives in your PC and run software raid 1.

This will eliminate network transfer bottleneck, protection from dead motherboards and is cost effective as you will only be out the price of the drives. Also if you just automatically store everything on the array no need for backup software ect. If drive dies your still good to run till you replace it. Software raid can be transferred to any PC with little setup. 

[Shur]

If you plan to keep all of your raw and edited recordings around, you will always need more storage

 

IMO one of the best reasons to build an unRaid machine is the ability to just add another drive at any time and not have to worry about the size.  As far as I know you cant do this with normal raid arrays

 

If you have any old hardware lying around you can dust it off and put it to work. If you don't get in to lots of add-ons or virtual machines unraid doesnt require anything powerful.  

 

What I ran into when trying off the shelf solutions was anything over 2 drives was too expensive, and anything with only 2 drives had a maximum drive size that meant it filled up relatively quickly

 

It depends on if you're after maximum storage now or a long term plan.  Maximum storage now at the lowest cost is adding more drives to your PC in software raid.  Long term I'd go with something like this: 

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 3 2200G 3.5 GHz Quad-Core Processor	$108.50 @ Vuugo
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-AX370-Gaming ATX AM4 Motherboard	$135.99 @ Newegg Canada
Memory	Team Elite Plus 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-2400 Memory	$43.99 @ Newegg Canada
Storage	Western Digital RE 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive	$52.45 @ Amazon Canada
Storage	Western Digital RE 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive	$52.45 @ Amazon Canada
Storage	Western Digital RE 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive	$52.45 @ Amazon Canada
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	$445.83
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-08-22 17:37 EDT-0400

 

 

That gets you 4TB right now and the ability to keep feeding it 2tb drives.  If you want to add larger drives down the road you would need to swap out your parity drive with one in that larger size as well, but that original 2tb parity drive can then be added to the array and used

 

That system listed above will come out over $500 with shipping and a case

[Mr.Humble]

The one major downside of the Meshify C. 

 

For now, I would suggest a 6-8TB internal hard drive, and one external one with adequate capacity as backup. 

 

Long term I'd suggest you look at the used market in your area or try to find old hardware lying around to build a dedicated NAS box. 

 

Personally I intend to go that route with the Fractal Design Node 304 and a mini ITX MB with 6 or more SATA ports. 

[blueburby1]

So I actually have a V71 Case sitting around, with all the drive cages...so I COULD build a system in that, I suppose I could put it in my closet and run ethernet to it.
 

give me a minute here, I'll post a projected spec list and then we can go over actually setting up the NAS lol

[blueburby1]

So I have:

 

V71 Case (assorted fans, but I can air cool the whole thing since it won't be getting hammered like the actual gaming rig)

I "might" have a working Z370+8700K but it might also be shot (stopped booting randomly....replaced with Z390 and 9900K in gaming rig.

 

So I'd need 8GB Ram, and the 3 starter drives.  Would I also want a boot SSD for the NAS?

[Shur]

The drives you want will vary (slightly, I think) depending on what NAS OS you want to use

 

Personally I recommend Unraid because you can add any drives to it and have useable space, you can easily expand* by adding a new drive and waiting for it to be cleared, and it will run dockers that can offload some tasks from your main rig (torrents and monitoring, etc)

 

I tried Freenas a long time ago and just didnt have a good time.  It worked but I switched, I dont recall exactly why. IIRC they also recommend 1GB ram per TB HD, not too costly at the moment but ram pricing just happens to be better right now.

 

If you are using Unraid you do not need a boot drive, you just need a usb flash drive.  The OS lives there

If you have 3 hard drives one of those can (and should) be used as a parity drive. You dont get to use that drive as storage space, it is there to save you in the event of a drive failure.  This will also be the largest (or one of) in the system. Don't worry if it's not a huge drive as it can be replaced down the road if you start to put 8TBs or 10TBs in the system

 

If you can steal a stick of ram from your gaming rig and have a couple old drives around you could try things out and see how it goes, Unraid has a 30 day trial

 

*expanding the size of the array is extremely easy in unraid. you plug in the drive, boot and click a few things to add it to your array. It will take some time to show up though, the system wants to zero the drive first. Expect this to take a few hours.  This will also happen when you first create your NAS array. It will zero all of the drives, expect between 4 and 16 hours depending on the number of drives and their size