Question by Metamatician: DAS, NAS, SAN – need help with increasing storage needs.?
First, a brief background. I’m only a regular guy and not a company! But I’ve been into computers all my life (since Apple II days) and worked for a decade after college in the IT field before I became disabled. Now I build PCs at home and like to try to stay up to date with ever-changing technology. Obviously, I don’t have an unlimited budget and it’s mostly a hobby, but it’s one of the things I most enjoy doing.
Ok, my question here. Lately I feel I’ve outgrown internal HDs, and that having multiple external HDs (even 1 or 2 TB models) is a bit cumbersome. I store a LOT of music, movies, television programs (mostly documentaries), and the like, in addition to my personal files like documents, programs, email, and so on. But the main space-consumer is video (Blu-ray quality or at least H.264, generally), and then audio (either Lossless or 320-bit CBR). Big libraries of video and audio chew through even large hard drives rather quickly.
Since “personal” class hard drives top out at 2TBs currently, I’ve just been adding more units… but at some point it becomes unwieldy and you run the risk of data loss with such a scheme, not to mention power management and performance. So lately I’ve been trying to learn about external boxes which house multiple drives, offer RAID 5 (say) redundancy+performance, give me the option to upgrade/expand as I go forward, and have their own power management and onboard processors to offload data management functions from my main machine, which I still use for games, the web, and productivity apps (mostly creative).
I’ve searched on terms like DAS, NAS, SAN, and so on, and I think I understand the basic players out there, in theory at least. What I don’t fully understand is what technologies/solutions are most appropriate to which price scale, and how easy or difficult they are to build and/or manage. Is it something I can keep at my home and is relatively easy to build partitions, configure RAID, replace faulty drives or PSUs? Or will it be offsite somewhere managed by a company and costing thousands of dollars?
The former is more what I’m after. I have about 10TB worth of external storage right now, but as mentioned before it’s a hodgepodge and not connected in any smart way. Backing up anything is up to me at the user level – not automated, no redundancy built in. I imagine a box of some sort which I can fill with off the shelf SATA drives from WD or Seagate, and that will power a single array which is both capacious and redundant enough to withstand drive failure. Bad drive is replaced, life goes on. Or, if I need to upgrade capacity, more OR bigger drives get inserted and the array can accommodate that dynamically.
I know I won’t have uber performance without some fiber setup or ultimate date protection without off-site hardware and fireproofing and so on, but I just can’t afford those types of “enterprise” setups. Like I said I’m a single dude just trying to manage a huge multimedia library – it’s my hobby and passion. I have a single powerful PC that I use and enough parts to make a few less-powerful ones, I use Windows 7 but I’m not stupid about Linux or any *nix, though I’m a bit out of date as I’ve not worked out in the field for approximately 6 years – a lifetime in computing, I know.
To sum up, I need to know where to start to educate myself and migrate into more robust and roomy data storage systems than what a typical PC user needs, yet I can’t afford the cost or manage the complexity of a full corporate, rack-mounted system like those I used to tend to back in the days from an IBM RS6000 running AIX and with full corporate support should I need it.
I need to be able to do this myself, to take that next step and protect my data from loss, index it for fast access, and all the rest, on not much more than a PC-user’s budget. I’d like to set things up as I said so that I can worry less about where everything is and whether it’s safe or not, and just have a relatively sizable vault of all my favorite movies, documentaries, tv shows, movies, concerts, and what have you at my fingertips, to enjoy when I want. The less fuss the better, and the cheaper the better, but NOT at the cost of compromising my data needlessly.
Sorry for such a long post but I don’t want an answer that is just a link or a wiki article about storage or something that doesn’t help me. Some actual good guides on how to proceed or answers from people who’ve made the transition I want to make are what I’m after.
Thank you very much ahead of time!
-Justin
Best answer:
Answer by Dangeroo
Justin – this from my experience. I went with a NAS box made by Infrant (now owned by Netgear). At the time I made my decision, I researched the hardware that was available at the time and the ReadyNAS NV+ was superior to everything out there at the time. I believe the NV+ set the bar. It was simple, robust, had very low power consumption, and shipped with Gigabit ethernet. Beefy power supply and a durable cooling fan.
There are a good number of competitors out now, but I would make the same choice today. The ReadyNas is still made and without drives, I’ve seen new ones for as little as $ 300. Same unit I paid $ 800 for 3 years ago.
Over time, I filled up NAS box and started swapping in drives that were 30% bigger, one at a time. It is time consuming and I wish I would have opted for an even bigger drive. This box WILL work with different size and brand drives, though I opted to keep the drives the same size and brand. Their X-Raid is pretty nice technology; very scalable. I use it with Macs, PCs and one Linux box.
The one caveat is to make sure you pick the drives from their compatibility list:
http://www.readynas.com/?cat=37
One of my brothers bought one of the cheaper knockoffs and he has had all kinds of data corruption problems.
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