- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
Go for a good SAS controller and SAS drives, then RAID with parity. SAS drives are built differently, I don't know if it's just flash and panache but you can feel it in your hand(they are way heavier).
External storage solutions? (Hard drives, SD cards, etc)
- Thread starter Sanshain
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- Apr 24, 2021
I purchased a few 6 TB WD Red NAS drives like 6-8 months before it was revealed they used SMR tech. So far haven't had any issues but I'm definitely paranoid about them. Replacing them is going to be a pain in the ass and expensive as fuck. How did they not get in trouble for branding SMR drives as NAS drives?
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2019
Would not recommend. These do not have SATA connections and if the case die you're fucked. I would go for larger 10TB+ Seagate HDDs.
It's not that they're more prone to breakage, they ARE still WD Red drives after all. The issue with those is that if you run a NAS using ZFS as your file system, it'll basically non-functional. Speed will be excruciatingly slow and the NAS may report the Drives as defective if you ever manage to fill up the buffer because they'll stop responding or slow to sub-1kb/s I/O speeds.
With a regular, off the shelf NAS for use as external storage you probably won't see any performance impediments unless you really put it through its paces. Like I said, if there's multiple people or applications accessing it at once and for long periods of time, that's when you'll see SMR falter.
And WD did get in trouble for this, people were scoping out a class-action lawsuit for fraud or something.
I was never affected by this, but I think they ended up exchanging them for equal-capacity, newer CMR WD Red drives for anyone who requested the exchange. If you still have the receit and the drives still have warranty you can probably request an exchange as well. Doesn't hurt to try.
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- Joined
- Apr 24, 2021
Good to know. I have them in a Synology using BTRFS and haven't noticed any performance issues. I purchased them in Feb of 2020 but I may still shoot them an email for the hell of it.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Do it yourself basically. For external storage get 2.5" enclosures and 2.5" SSD's and for long-term archival storage build a PC with FreeNAS in RAID 1 for redundancy. It's not gonna be cheap, but it will be reliable, expandable, and you won't be dependent on proprietary solutions as is the case with ready-to-use external drives and AIO NAS solutions like the ones from Synology.
One thing to note here:
While data on a RAID Z1 or 2 array will be much more safe than single HDDs, you can still lose everything in a single act of misfortune. Fire, flooding, power surge or burglary just to name a few.
Any data you absolutely cannot afford to lose needs at least one offsite backup, be it on a regular cheap external HDD you leave with someone you trust, on someone elses NAS or, if all else isn't an option, an encrypted file container in the commercial cloud.
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2019
NAS's have to be powered on and maintained and watched for faults.
SSD's leak their charge if not powered on.
Mechanical hard drives might not spin up if stored for a long time.
@Sanshain said
I think OP really needs to give some more details on the problem. How much data we talking and does it need to be live or not?
SSD's leak their charge if not powered on.
Mechanical hard drives might not spin up if stored for a long time.
@Sanshain said
I read that as stuck up on the shelf cold. Not powered for a few years. If that is the case then its LTO tape or optical.
I think OP really needs to give some more details on the problem. How much data we talking and does it need to be live or not?
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
Not related to flood or fire but a friend worked at a place that used the new and horrible IBM DeskStars. 15 minutes after the first drive in the array died the others started failing as well, obliterating the whole thing.
This is what those drives did to the platters(not my picture), data recovery is not possible after the recording medium have been stripped away.
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Holy shit that's brutal, never thought something like this was even possible.
I'd go as far as to call that "HDD snuff"
Shroom King
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 22, 2014
Are 3.5 inch drives better than 2.5 inch drives? It seems like most NAS boxes are built for 3.5 inch drives.
If you're building a NAS I'd recommend 3.5 inch drives. They're a little cheaper per TB and most enterprise level models are built in the 3.5 inch format anyways, so you have a lot fewer and worse choices in the 2.5 inch segment. The only exceptions to this that I can see are either if physical space is somehow SO limited that you can only fit a NAS that uses 2.5 inch drives or if you're shucking your drives and get an amazing deal on the smallones.
If you're talking simple consumer-grade external drives the 2.5 inch ones can be nice because they don't need to be powered externally, so you just plug in the USB and you're ready.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
2.5" drives can be good for various reasons, and I'm talking SAS drives here, that doesn't matter to a NAS, but there's one thing to consider: energy consumption and heat output.
They will be more expensive and I don't remember the numbers( or know what you pay for electricity) but over 12-18 months you save enough on electricity to make up for the extra cost.
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2019
Fuck USB. Buy a NAS box, put two HDDs inside and have two copies of everything in case one of them dies or something gets corrupted.
I actually keep three copies of everything. Two on the NAS box and one on a hard drive inside my desktop.
I actually keep three copies of everything. Two on the NAS box and one on a hard drive inside my desktop.
- Joined
- Aug 16, 2020
And the NAS is more reusable, reliable, and potentially expandable. It's worth checking craigslist for used synologies if you want to try to cheap out, small businesses will typically sell their old ones if they upgrade.
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2019
I have a 1TB Seagate Ultra Touch HDD full of very valuable data belonging to myself and my family - a fuck ton of photos, music, old files dating back to my grade school days, et cetera. I would be fucking pissed if I lost any of it. How long until the current drive shits itself, and what's the most cost-efficient and hassle-free way to store redundant copies of this precious data? I can't afford to acquire / administrate an NAS server or anything on that scale.
The only other external drive I have is an old 500GB one my dad used to store pirated movies on. The Lindy effect applies to computer hardware IME, so backing my current drive up on this is old one is a safe bet.... for the time being.
The only other external drive I have is an old 500GB one my dad used to store pirated movies on. The Lindy effect applies to computer hardware IME, so backing my current drive up on this is old one is a safe bet.... for the time being.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
There's no way of knowing. Hard drives can last forever... or not.
Can you buy another hard drive? You could just use something like Clonezilla to do a full-disk backup.
- Joined
- Jul 14, 2019
I do have another hard drive, though it's an older one, as I mentioned in the previous post. I'm rsyncing the two as we speak.
I suppose I can just keep two copies rsync'd every once in a while, and buy a new one when one inevitably shits itself. I'd have to have an extreme bout of bad luck for both to peter out within a few days of each other.
- Joined
- Aug 16, 2020
Cloud storage can be pretty cheap, especially if it's only for backups. Look up "hot storage" and "cold storage" as they may help find the right service for you.
That said, "hot storage" is basically what you're used to with a drive, you can read and write as you see fit.
"Cold storage" means you rarely access it and it's mostly just sitting around doing nothing. Typically online cold storage has a minimum amount of time you have to keep the data up or you pay a pro-rated amount for taking it down early. That doesn't mean you get charged for premature file access, just premature deletion of where you store the files.
It matters because cold storage is significantly cheaper but usually has a "steep" cost to retrieve the data, relative to hot/warm data.
As an example
Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service Pricing - Amazon Web Services
Find detailed information on Free Tier, storage pricing, requests and data retrieval pricing, data transfer and transfer acceleration pricing, and data management features pricing options for all classes of S3 cloud storage.
S3 Glacier Deep storage is $0.00099 per GB with $0.05 per 1000 PUT requests and retrievals are $0.002 per GB with $0.025 per request.
So that'd be about $1/month to store everything you have and then $2 to recover it + bandwidth fees at $0.09 per GB. Those are the cheapest options I think Amazon has so if you're ok with spending more for faster access or a different plan then explore it a bit. If you're really paranoid about Amazon seeing your files then you could put them in a Veracrypt container and upload that, but it'd be an all or nothing deal and require you have something to store that entire Veracrypt container on that's at least the size of everything you're storing. The encryption would also take awhile but I doubt that's an issue.
It's worth researching this before just jumping on a plan. Disclaimer - I've personally never done a proper remote backup of files and have just thrown encrypted stuff in normal S3 buckets. I'd watch some videos of people explaining services and pricing before throwing any money down as there are charges for number of requests and sizes to keep in mind.
Warnings aside, it's all known for being cheap until you are in the multi-TB range.
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Where the fuck is OP and did they ever figure something out? @Sanshain
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