Just spent 587.98 euros to upgrade my RAID....

[pes2013]

God that hurt......but I knew sooner or later it had to be done.

At least I HOPE that I dont have to upgrade it again.....

I have 4 SATA HDDs now up for sale :p

[n_K]

?580, what'd you get, 10x2TB drives or something!?

[pes2013]

?580, what'd you get, 10x2TB drives or something!?

4x3TB

[SuperKid]

Somebody has a well paid job. Nice! What was the upgrade though let us know!

[pes2013]

Newegg has the same HDDs for 599.96 dollars (which is 460.87 euros)

Somebody has a well paid job. Nice! What was the upgrade though let us know!

Not at all :( (Maybe thats why it hurt the most) but it had to be done sooner or later....

[pes2013]

I just noticed something: If I move my PC and/or change my motherboard, this RAID5 will break. Im going to have to get a RAID5 card :( Damn it, and my order has already shipped....

[JaredFrost]

haha, I was thinking of doing the same thing the other day, priced everything out and everything, came to $530 CAD, then I talked myself out of it till Boxing Day.

[StrikedOut]

Thants what backups are for! :D

[Japlabot]

How are you backing it all up?

[+BudMan MVC]

"sooner or later it had to be done"

To be honest, I would of went with later. Prices of drives are still not back to what they were. As the new bigger drives come out, those 3TB are for sure going to drop in price as well.

I wouldn't mind some more space, but not full yet and there is always stuff I could remove if it comes to choice of being raped over on the price vs deleting a few things. I am quite sure I will update storage space at some point - but later would of currently been the better option from a price point.

[cybertimber2008]

I just noticed something: If I move my PC and/or change my motherboard, this RAID5 will break. Im going to have to get a RAID5 card :( Damn it, and my order has already shipped....

Raid 5? OBR10 baby ;)

[pes2013]

Thants what backups are for! :D

It would take me ages to backup...

How are you backing it all up?

I dont backup (Please lets not start a topic on RAID being a backup solution or not)

"sooner or later it had to be done"

To be honest, I would of went with later. Prices of drives are still not back to what they were. As the new bigger drives come out, those 3TB are for sure going to drop in price as well.

I wouldn't mind some more space, but not full yet and there is always stuff I could remove if it comes to choice of being raped over on the price vs deleting a few things. I am quite sure I will update storage space at some point - but later would of currently been the better option from a price point.

When is "later"?

ANd I am completely full. My current RAID5 is at 10MB and my OS drive (since I cant put anything anywhere else) is about at 500MB. Im maxed out. And thats after deleting things.....

Worst part is that after ordering it, I realized that if I move to another PC, there is no chance in hell that I can move ~9TB of data over so I have to buy a RAID5 card :( (and spend more money) https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1110259-recommend-a-raid5-pci-or-pci-e-card/

[+BudMan MVC]

Well I don't know what is on your storage array, but clearly in mind I would of either archived stuff off to optical media. Or just dug deeper into what I was willing to delete vs getting raped at the current prices. Only on failure would I eat these costs to be honest.

[pes2013]

Well I don't know what is on your storage array, but clearly in mind I would of either archived stuff off to optical media. Or just dug deeper into what I was willing to delete vs getting raped at the current prices. Only on failure would I eat these costs to be honest.

Optical media is the worst; Completely unrealiable (Ive done it before with CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray, all have failed after a while, I was completely surprised with Blu-Ray but oh well)

Like I said, I deleted all that I could delete. And it is "have or lose" things on my storage array.

And the raping has gone on for years..........we will never know when prices truely will come down (or when SSD storage will catch up)

[+BudMan MVC]

Well I have to wonder how this stuff you would "lose" if you deleted off your array is backed up then.

There is nothing on my storage array I could not get back, its just stored there for convience of access. I have the stuff that is not recoverable backed up to multiple locations, and yes on optical media as one option for other locations as well as multiple disks on different systems in my house plus online. I could delete my whole array and it would mean nothing other than time to restore/re-rip/etc

So now your going to have 6TB of storage - if this stuff is all non recoverable data, that you would be lost. Your just setting yourself up for a fall and heart ache when the array fails, or gets stolen or you delete something you did not mean too. Raid 5 is not a BACKUP!! Raid 6 is NOT a backup, raid 10, raid X is not a backup.

Its great that you setup up raid to save yourself some restore time or loss of access until restore on failure of 1 drive in the array - but if stuff on there is stored that can not be recovered your just waiting for data loss to happen.

edit: While I agree that optical media is not great long term storage or backup. It should be safe for a few years and as 1 leg of your DR plan for your highly critical files (home videos/pictures) I am looking into moving my grand daughters videos to

http://millenniata.com/m-disc/

[Roger H. Veteran]

Need to do this myself so I was wondering if I should go to 3TB drives or just wait till 4TB ones get cheaper. Not using them as boot drives obviously.

Next thing being to RAID or not to RAID :p. Was thinking to get storage spaces on Server 2012 so I don't gotta deal with this big upgrade again.

OH well, enough of me. Congrats! I'm too broke now to buy drives I need but definitely need to upgrade soon, got like 120GB free! :(

[+BudMan MVC]

currently the 3tb from what I have looked is the best bang for the buck $ per GB. This is how I always compare sizes - size / price to get common how many cents per GB.

Raid or not is a big question, with all the non raid ways of creating storage space it is a big question. I am just using drive pool from stablebit currently to allow me to access all the space on all the drives I want as 1 share. Along with multiple copies of my more critical files on more than 1 disk in the storage. This allows me to grow on the fly - just add more disks, or pull out smaller disk and put in bigger one. No need for any special raid controller, and worse case can just put these disks on any computer and access the files on the disk just like normal with normal file names and dir, etc.

If a drive is lost, only have to restore files on that disk that was lost. Combined with smart monitoring of the disk, and the drive scanner from same company - I would hope to get warning of any drive failure (hope too) and just be able to remove files off that disk and move to new one, etc..

With people wanting to store more and more stuff, and being able to expand that on the fly in the home market I would look outside standard raid models for what works for you. Especially with drive costs being as they are -- not sure I want to loose a disk to parity for what I am storing. If I did want parity I would prob go with the unraid type model where there is a specific parity disk and can expand on the fiy with disks as large as the parity disk up to 20 some TB, etc..

edit: So for example as I get closer to needing more space my plan is to replace one of the 750GB with a 3TB and move that 750GB as a datastore for my VMs vs the current 250GB. Cost of upgrade in 2TB + more space the cost of 1 3TB drive. And that is just because I want to upgrade that 250 and reuse one of the 750's. Then next update will prob just add another 3TB drive as some latter date as that 2TB becomes full. Or maybe just swap out the other 750 because its oldest of the disks and more likely to fail before others, etc.

[pes2013]

Got the drives today :) I plugged one of them in because i also ordered a external eSATA/USB2 case so I wanted to test out.

First time in my life Ive had to use GPT instead of classic MBR. I didnt format it, make a volume, etc yet. Just wanted to test it out. Sounds quiet :) but lets see when four are put together.

Cant do anything as Im waiting for my RAID5 card to arrive so sadly Itll be collecting dust while I only have 100MB left on my current RAID5.

[pes2013]

Another thing in my head is that what do to with the current drives?

My OS drive is currently I think a 500gb and these are smaller so if I RAID0, Ill lose some space....

[pes2013]

Another thing in my head is that what do to with the current drives?

My OS drive is currently I think a 500gb and these are smaller so if I RAID0, Ill lose some space....

Just occured a great idea when I woke up this morning! :)

Even if they are smaller I can RAID 0+1 = Two of the smaller disks each at least 500gb, put them in a RAID 0 and that RAID 0 combine it with the 500gb to form a RAID1!

That means my OS will be on a RAID 0+1 (using my motherboard's onboard RAID controller)

And my storage will be on a RAID 5 (using that external PCI-E card Im waiting for to arrive next week)