External (?) RAID enclosure

[LukasP46]

My brother is in the video production and defiantly needs some redundant storage. A NAS is not needed, because he works only from his Desktop, which has

• One USB3.1 Gen 2 ports
• no thunderbolt
• no redundant PSU or a battery pack...
• not enough space for a lot more HDDs
• Empty PCI and PCIe Ports

I don't want to use the chipset RAID, because the Storage should be independent. Practicle, if my brother upgrades his PC.

 

The storage

• should be safe for power failure (so without cache?)
• needs to support RAID-5 and also upgradable if one HDD gets added later
• at least 4 bay, 5 would be perfect

 

I have several ideas and I don't know which one is the best. My brother also has already 2 8TB drives.

 

1. Idea

Internal PCIe RAID Controller with external SAS conected enclosure

+ performance

- expensive I guess

- not too easy to configure

 

2. Idea

External USB3.1 Gen 2 RAID enclosure

+ easy to use

+ not too expensive

- hard to find good ones without preinstalled drives

 

3. Idea

External USB3.0 RAID enclosure

+ easy to use

+ not too expensive

- speed (?)

 

 

4. Idea

External Thunderbold 3 RAID enclosure

+ easy to use

+ fast

- need to buy Thunderbold 3 card

[Radium_Angel]

10 minutes ago, LukasP46 said:

redundant PSU or a battery pack

He likes living on the edge...

I'd start with that (a UPS is cheap these days) and something like a 5 bay USB 3.0 Synology DAS (Direct Attached Storage) they are all over newegg, barebones, for under 150$

[LukasP46]

Thank you. Turned out that his budget doesn't allow a DAS in the near future, but he will buy a UPS (didn't know that there aren't so expensive). He makes a backup of the footage on an external drive he only connect if he needs to backup or archive something by now... Should be safe enough. The footage is on at least two independent drives... 

I can't find any used DAS here in Germany, but also I can not find any Synology DAS exept the Thunderbold ones which are used to extend there NAS (or can they just be used as normal DAS, but how to configure the RAID?)

[Radium_Angel]

2 hours ago, LukasP46 said:

but how to configure the RAID?

Software is built into the DAS/NAS, and personally I'd go with RAID 5.

[ToastyBear]

Here are some things you should consider.

 

If you have an old motherboard and CPU. You can just cobble up a second computer and use that to host your hard drives. Its going to be much cheaper than some NAS or RAID enclosure.

 

Chipset RAID is fine so as long you stay within the same platform. RAID created on an Intel chipset works with any Intel chipset and will probably continue to work in the future so you can just use that. Intel RAID has crappy performance but it should still beat any NAS enclosure by a mile.

 

Alternative you can go for a RAID card from LSI or Microsemi if you want maximum performance. You can find some cheap cards on ebay, especially older generations. A lot of servers get upgraded each year and the old cards find their way on ebay all the time. 

 

To protect your data from power failure, you can either add a backup battery to a RAID card or just set your drives to "write through" so it doesn't cache any data.