JBOD my rig or get a NAS?

[JMDeeDeeDee]

Budget (including currency): Nothing set in stone, but preferably <$500 USD

Country: United States (Not near a microcenter, sadly)

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Occasional gaming, personal photo/video; music, and movie storage; as well as possibly surveillance cameras

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

I currently am running a Ryzen 3600 and an R5600XT on a B550 Tomahawk. My concerns of late regard to storage. At this moment I have: a 1TB WD Blue HDD at 67,000 Power on Hours, a 2TB WD Blue HDD at 18,500 PoH, a 500GB Toshiba HDD at 18,000 PoH, a 250GB SATA SSD SKHynix SSD with 24,000 PoH, a 500GB WD Blue NVMe with 21,000 PoH, and a 2TB 970 Evo NVMe SSD with 3,800 PoH.

I have on two occasions in the past lost hard drives, resulting in only the loss of mostly movies and music luckily. A friend recently lost his HDD and it resulted in the loss of all of his back-ups of his personal photos and videos, many of which were of notable occasions involving his child. I have a 4 Y.O. toddler and have amassed a fair amount of photos and videos that I find rather sentimental and would be quite distraught finding myself in a similar situation.

I have folders with all of this data on both my 1TB and 2TB hard drive, as a "safety measure" but know this isn't sufficient. I also am currently re-doing my home surveillance and hate the GUI that my NVR for my cameras use. This made me consider getting a NAS to run them off of, as well as have another fail-safe in place for my more treasured files. If I go with a NAS I would be considering something like a Synology due to my lack of knowledge regarding Linux and not wanting to run a separate rig to set up something like Unraid (not to mention the aforementioned lack of time to learn it).

I was also wondering if it would be a good idea / if there is a good way to just expand my storage in my current rig with some NAS rated HDDs and set something up for my use-cases, such as better auto-backup management. My rig is on 24/7 due to stubbornness and bad habit from the old days of 5 minute boot-ups and horrid sleep-state recovery. (Hence the high power on hour counts on some of my drives). I don't really game a lot anymore due to time or motivation issues, but do occasionally. I do frequently consume media such as youtube and movies (streamed and saved files).

Sorry for the long winded and ADHD riddled post, haven't participated in any forums in many years and for some inexplicable reason found this more strenuous to write out that I expected, and I feel like I have left something key out lol. Any recommendations and help is much appreciated, and any other details needed to provide such just let me know.

 

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, JMDeeDeeDee said:

Budget (including currency): Nothing set in stone, but preferably <$500 USD

Country: United States (Not near a microcenter, sadly)

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Occasional gaming, personal photo/video; music, and movie storage; as well as possibly surveillance cameras

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

I currently am running a Ryzen 3600 and an R5600XT on a B550 Tomahawk. My concerns of late regard to storage. At this moment I have: a 1TB WD Blue HDD at 67,000 Power on Hours, a 2TB WD Blue HDD at 18,500 PoH, a 500GB Toshiba HDD at 18,000 PoH, a 250GB SATA SSD SKHynix SSD with 24,000 PoH, a 500GB WD Blue NVMe with 21,000 PoH, and a 2TB 970 Evo NVMe SSD with 3,800 PoH.

I have on two occasions in the past lost hard drives, resulting in only the loss of mostly movies and music luckily. A friend recently lost his HDD and it resulted in the loss of all of his back-ups of his personal photos and videos, many of which were of notable occasions involving his child. I have a 4 Y.O. toddler and have amassed a fair amount of photos and videos that I find rather sentimental and would be quite distraught finding myself in a similar situation.

I have folders with all of this data on both my 1TB and 2TB hard drive, as a "safety measure" but know this isn't sufficient. I also am currently re-doing my home surveillance and hate the GUI that my NVR for my cameras use. This made me consider getting a NAS to run them off of, as well as have another fail-safe in place for my more treasured files. If I go with a NAS I would be considering something like a Synology due to my lack of knowledge regarding Linux and not wanting to run a separate rig to set up something like Unraid (not to mention the aforementioned lack of time to learn it).

I was also wondering if it would be a good idea / if there is a good way to just expand my storage in my current rig with some NAS rated HDDs and set something up for my use-cases, such as better auto-backup management. My rig is on 24/7 due to stubbornness and bad habit from the old days of 5 minute boot-ups and horrid sleep-state recovery. (Hence the high power on hour counts on some of my drives). I don't really game a lot anymore due to time or motivation issues, but do occasionally. I do frequently consume media such as youtube and movies (streamed and saved files).

Sorry for the long winded and ADHD riddled post, haven't participated in any forums in many years and for some inexplicable reason found this more strenuous to write out that I expected, and I feel like I have left something key out lol. Any recommendations and help is much appreciated, and any other details needed to provide such just let me know.

 

I'd keep it simple. Replace all of your old spinning HDD;s with a single large hdd like a 10tb drive. Get a second one in a USB enclosure and use it for a weekly backup target (unplugged when not actively backing up)

 

Then for important family pictures and stuff like that, in the cloud they go.

[Bismut]

Oioioi, that's too many harddisks (an issue I am absolutely unfamiliar with, of course). You could JBOD them and have some sorta auto-backup going I guess, but no clue how to set that up in Windows. I would agree with @Blue4130 when it comes to consolodating into one huge disk, though I would go for a daily (or even hourly) backup, which has saved my bacon a few times. Maybe you can keep all your current drives and just back them up onto that one disk to rule them all, but I wouldn't *rely* on that.

I would consider going for (and relying on) a 3-2-1 backup if you have data you don't want to lose, so storing the important stuff on an SSD, spinning rust and then another copy off-site, for example in the cloud. I would also say to reconsider building a DIY NAS, though that might be the tinkerer in me talking.

[JMDeeDeeDee]

I appreciate the responses.

Is there a way to set a specific drive to only power up on a schedule for backup, so that I could use the "Second one in a USB enclosure" idea for daily/weekly backups but in an automated fashion that wouldn't rely on my having to plug in and manually do it? Having it only spin up when needed would help keep the PoH low which I assume contributes to the list of things that cause a drive to fail.

As far as cloud storage, I looked into it several years ago and the only decent options with a fair amount of space cost a decent monthly premium. Are there any preferred services these days for archival purposes? I think a 1TB would be more than plenty for me for quite some time.

[Blue4130]

50 minutes ago, JMDeeDeeDee said:

I appreciate the responses.

Is there a way to set a specific drive to only power up on a schedule for backup, so that I could use the "Second one in a USB enclosure" idea for daily/weekly backups but in an automated fashion that wouldn't rely on my having to plug in and manually do it? Having it only spin up when needed would help keep the PoH low which I assume contributes to the list of things that cause a drive to fail.

As far as cloud storage, I looked into it several years ago and the only decent options with a fair amount of space cost a decent monthly premium. Are there any preferred services these days for archival purposes? I think a 1TB would be more than plenty for me for quite some time.

For straight up cheap archive only Amazon glacier is pretty cheap. 

 

As for just spinning down a disk, I guess you could, but it's still a risk having it in the system. A power surge or virus could still affect it potentially. That was my reasoning for suggesting a usb attached drive. Minimize the time that it is connected.