Questions about DAS (Not NAS)

[BrandonLatzig]

I am interested in getting a DAS for backing up and external storage, what  should I know before I go into this stuff?

[whispous]

So, this is for backup and external storage?

 

Obviously by backup you mean this is at least the second copy of vital data and not the sole location of anything you consider important, right?

 

Aside from being a backup, you say external storage - what will you be storing on it? If it's games, you might want to consider having it be an SSD rather than a HDD if you want the snappier read performance.

[tkitch]

budget

Estimate of how much data space you need (and then go up a lot)

how fast do you actually need the storage to be 

how important is the data, and what level of redundancy do you want?

 

1 disk?  2 Disks?  Other? 

[BrandonLatzig]

11 minutes ago, whispous said:

So, this is for backup and external storage?

 

Obviously by backup you mean this is at least the second copy of vital data and not the sole location of anything you consider important, right?

 

Aside from being a backup, you say external storage - what will you be storing on it? If it's games, you might want to consider having it be an SSD rather than a HDD if you want the snappier read performance.

more so photos and thing sthat I can't redownload and I dont feel comfortable storing online. Games are games, I can always redownload them.

 

11 minutes ago, tkitch said:

1 disk?  2 Disks?  Other? 

I found a sabrent hub that can hold 2 hdds (and I assume 2 ssds with adapters) for around 140 dollars, seems pretty good considering if comes with raid capablity

[BrandonLatzig]

15 minutes ago, whispous said:

HDD if you want the snappier read performance.

I'll be completely honest here, My hdd's do good enough jobs for this. The ONLY game that is slow to boot is rimworld but nothing can fix that

[Electronics Wizardy]

How much storage do you want?

 

How do you want to connect this das?

[BrandonLatzig]

58 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

How much storage do you want?

 

How do you want to connect this das?

Well 8tb would probably be more than enough. And isnt there only one way to connect to a das? Since its literally direct storage

[Electronics Wizardy]

13 minutes ago, BrandonLatzig said:

Well 8tb would probably be more than enough. And isnt there only one way to connect to a das? Since its literally direct storage

Id just get a external hdd then. Or get a external ssd if you want more speed.

 

There are lots of ways to connect like usb, thunderbolt, sas, and more.

[Blue4130]

13 minutes ago, BrandonLatzig said:

Well 8tb would probably be more than enough. And isnt there only one way to connect to a das? Since its literally direct storage

No. You can go with a bunch of different USB options, all the way up to direct attach copper or optical fiber and other ways in between.

[BrandonLatzig]

1 hour ago, Blue4130 said:

No. You can go with a bunch of different USB options, all the way up to direct attach copper or optical fiber and other ways in between.

Ah, well the more you learn.

And the reason im leaning towards das is just because this one i found has raid support so im curious

[Blue4130]

6 minutes ago, BrandonLatzig said:

Ah, well the more you learn.

And the reason im leaning towards das is just because this one i found has raid support so im curious

I am always nervous about those things. I'd do some reasearch. What happens to the RAID if the board dies? Are you able to pull the drives and mount them as a volume on a standard desktop? Not all allow that, they tend to do funky things when writing the data. I am not trying to steer you away from them, just make sure you know the limitations first.

[MG2R]

Is there a reason you specifically want DAS? Because reading this, it sounds like your use case would really benefit from a NAS 

[LIGISTX]

A NAS is almost always a better solution… 

 

And as others said, don’t get anything that has RAID unless it’s from a well trusted company. Anything goes wrong with the RAID controller or software, and your data is done, gone forever. Big names like synology for example have much better support and ability to move drives to new enclosures to rescue data, etc.