Data Data Everywhere


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Hello!

This is my first post to the forum although I have been lurking for some time now.

I am hoping to get some advise from some of you.

I have a data storage problem! I have 4 1TB, 2 750GB, and 2 500GB USB hard drives connected to an iMac in my house. The iMac is used to serve up data to my house (which consists of 2 Macbook pros, 1 Mac-Mini, and 1 PC). Most of the data is HD video content which plays through plex and XBMC on all of the systems. The rest of the Data is work for my photographic business and then some general stuff. Everything is connected via gigabit ethernet and wireless N.

Currently I have all the hard drives setup as 2 JBOD raids, the first contains all of the data listed above, the second is a time machine drive that the iMac automatically backs up the first raid to, meaning that if one drive fails I always have a backup.

The problem!

As these drives have filled up over the past few months they have become very slow.

I also generate about 100GB of data a week from various sources and need all this backing up.

I will also soon need to but some more hard drives and I dont think the iMac will be able to take anymore USB disks without grounding to a halt!

The Solution!

I am not to bothered about having proper backups of my data like time machine makes, but I do need data redundancy, I.E if one of the drives fail I still need to access all the data that was on it.

I need my system to be redundant and easily expandable and overall quite fast!

I was thinking about setting up a fileserver running OSX Server and installing the drives directly inside the server case.

But I would appreciate your input on my problem and if you could tell me about your systems and solutions?

Many thanks :)

Karl

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I know you are a mac guy but a Drobo or even a Windows Home Server does great with that sorta setup. The little one from HP can take 4 drives at 2TB each and if 1 fails you are ok. You can even plug in more drives via the 6 USB ports. All these drives (close to 16TB if you have the cash) are just JBODed so you don't have to configure anything, just plug in a new one and it's automatically added to the setup.

There are plugins for time machine support i think also as well as tons of other stuff since it runs on the Windows Server code. Eitherway, something to check out.

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Why not look into the XServe RAID? You've not mentioned a budget or what so it might be out of it, but you might be able to find a cheap one (maybe just an empty housing) on eBay etc. Not sure what their connectivity is, but I know then can handle 16 drives, or the latest ones can anyway.

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I have been using QNAP 409 pro for a year now, with 4 1TB disks in Raid 5 configuration. 1 disk is used for parity, so even one of the drives dies, you can still access all your data, and just put in a new drive instead of the failing one, and you are good to go with raid protection again. Also you can increase the size of the raid while the data is still accessible. Let's say you have 4 x 1TB drives, and need more space, you change one of the drives with a 2 TB one, rebuild the raid, then change the second one, rebuild agian etc..., it takes a serious amount of time, but in the end you can upgrade your space while the data is accessible.

It's basically running on linux, has gigabit ethernet, has torrent, download, media services built in.

http://www.qnap.com

I can say that I am quite happy with mine, last year I paid 600 AU$, so not very cheap, considering the cost of the drives too.

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