6 replies to this topic

[StephenFrink]

I need greater storage capacity very soon, and am looking into the current state of the art in 4 - 6 TB storage. As dependability is so important, and because I'll need to buy at least 3 of whatever is chosen, for redundancy, I'm eager to hear what works well for others. Thanks.

Edited by StephenFrink, 21 September 2010 - 08:27 AM.

[TheRealDrew]

I need greater storage capacity very soon, and am looking into the current state of the art in 4 - 6 GB storage. As dependability is so important, and because I'll need to buy at least 3 of whatever is chosen, for redundancy, I'm eager to hear what works well for others. Thanks.

Stephen, do you mean Compact Flash cards type things or do you mean hard drives? (Not sure what you meant since the title says hard drives, but the size seems low ) I like SanDisk for CF cards. HDs I rotate through brands. Seagate, WD and Hitachi are gnerally what I use. Have had good success with 2 Terrabyte Hitachis lately....

[StephenFrink]

Stephen, do you mean Compact Flash cards type things or do you mean hard drives? (Not sure what you meant since the title says hard drives, but the size seems low ) I like SanDisk for CF cards. HDs I rotate through brands. Seagate, WD and Hitachi are gnerally what I use. Have had good success with 2 Terrabyte Hitachis lately....

Oops ... my bad. 4 - 6 TB is what I meant and have now corrected my post. I'm sure you thought I was nuts.

[TheRealDrew]

Oops ... my bad. 4 - 6 TB is what I meant and have now corrected my post. I'm sure you thought I was nuts.

We all take expensive electronics underwater, so we are all nuts

I use various enclosures set up as various RAID types (RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 5). One enclosure that I like is the OQC Pro QX2 which does a varitey of RAIDs, including a RAID 5 with a hot swap. (Three drives in RAID 5 and if one fails the 4th is added in) Decent speed even in RAID 5. I would get a bare enclosure and add your own drives. Wiebetech also has some nice solutions. including the RTX Series where you can pull drives in and out like floppies and store them in VCR like cases. Good for off site storage also.

[Drew]

Hey Stephen. I just replaced all my drives with 8x 2TB for my off site backup server so I don't have to deal with it for another 4-5 years. I bought 2 types of drives: the Western Digital RE4 GreenPower 2TB x4 and the Samsung F3 Eco 2tb x4.
The Samsung are a lot cheaper but they are a consumer drive and not designed to be servers (24x7 on). But I chose them because they are cheaper. The WD RE4GP are my main server drives running a RAID 1+0 configuration. The Samsung backs up the main backup server, all using green power

[bvanant]

I need greater storage capacity very soon, and am looking into the current state of the art in 4 - 6 TB storage. As dependability is so important, and because I'll need to buy at least 3 of whatever is chosen, for redundancy, I'm eager to hear what works well for others. Thanks.

If you need high speed for video editing from the drive then Wiebetech makes some great hardware. We have two (4x2gb) Wiebetech systems and two Drobo systems. The Drobos are a lot cheaper and so far (knocking on his head) we have had no issues. You can not edit video from them but otherwise they seem fine. Mostly I am using WD drives in the enclosures and change drives out every 24 to 30 months.
Bill

[cronix]

I need greater storage capacity very soon, and am looking into the current state of the art in 4 - 6 TB storage. As dependability is so important, and because I'll need to buy at least 3 of whatever is chosen, for redundancy, I'm eager to hear what works well for others. Thanks.

Hi Stephen,

I use a server at home with a Raid 5 disk array (actually two arrays). Raid is not a form of backup. It just gives me more reliability when a disk crashes. I can then rebuild the array based on what is on the other disks. Another advantage of a raid array is that you can create enormously large storage folders. Don't use software Raid. I have had bad experiences with that. Get a proper raid controller if you choose to go this way

I have two full backups of this server. One of these backups is off-site.

Regards,
Andre Crone