Computers and Software > Computers and Software - General
I guess I'm a little surprised
screenxpress:
I think all the conversations about backups are good. Gets people thinking of their needs, their options and what might work best for them.
Actually what I'm picking up on is that something like synchroncity might (almost) be more preferable than a Raid for the single PC user where they can just drop a drive in a dock or a usb hookup, run the sync and either put the drive on a shelf or take to Uncle Bob's for safekeeping.
I guess it all comes down to what makes you feel safer if you're afraid of a crash.
Gilligan:
Yeah, Raid is essentially a redundant convenience... an EXTRA layer. Things can and WILL still go wrong even with a well thought out raid solution. You really want a backup. That said... a "single" backup isn't much better, especially if you never disconnect it and bring it off site.
With a natural disaster or robbery you still lose it all if it's sitting on the shelf. You really have to get it OUT of the building. But if you have it at "uncle bobs" and your crap goes down... now you got to go get your backup. With a raid, you would not even have to stop working. You just replace the drive at your EARLIEST convenience and you are back at square one. All the while that backup is tucked away off site in case it's not something simple like a computer malfunction.
I built that system I referenced earlier for under a grand... I SOLD it for 1300 cash to the embroidery guy... it had an AMD 6 core 3.3ghz CPU, 8 gigs of DDR3 ram (the good stuff), 60 gig solid state SATA drive, two WD BLACK 750gig drives in the raid 1, dvdrw, USB 3, a badass case with power supply on the bottom and LARGE fans all around (my home server with the 5 hard drives (one OS and the 4 in the raid 5) is in the same case, I love it), Win7 64bit. Blah blah blah.
So for the single user/workstation setup that is a pretty sweet deal. That is a beast of a system, it has an after market cooler in it so it could be over clocked and probably see 4ghz if one wanted and has TWO free slots for more RAM... another few bucks and you got 16 gigs of ram in a heart beat!
Taking orders now. ;)
squeegee:
No worries! I like nerding out on computer stuff, especially on a Sat when I don't have customers and employees breathing down my neck!
I'm not really up on the RAID jargon, but I do know that mine is mirrored. Just looked, it's set up RAID 1. It's a cheap Dlink with dual 500GB drives, but it's worked fine for several years, even has an FTP which actually works.
The main hitch like you said is the GB interface. I've looked and looked for a NAS that has GB + a local connection via esata but no luck except the QNAP one I mentioned which really isn't the same thing.
I would be *nice* if you could copy at esata speeds from a locally connected computer while have GB for the network at the same time.
What about a 4 drive NAS, is there such an animal that will allow 2 drives in RAID 0 as you said for SPEED, while the other 2 drives mirror?
squeegee:
Oh and get this, I've tried Synchronicity now twice, once with the sata dock connected via esata, and also with a USB drive.
Data transfer rates:
USB 2-4 MB/s
Esata 6-7 MB/s
I was expecting better speed, my network is Cat 5e/Cat6 cable and GB switches.
Any ideas?
Gilligan:
Well, what you are referring to is a Raid 0+1 or a Raid 1+0 (or Raid 10).
Difference is that in Raid 0+1 the pairs are striped (raid 0) THEN those pairs are mirrored (the raid 1 part). In the Raid 10 you first mirror the pairs THEN stripe the mirrors (Raid 1 THEN Raid 0).
I haven't looked into it in a while but I'm betting the Raid 0+1 is a TINY bit faster than the Raid 10 BUT the Raid 10 is a good deal safer. You have 6 combinations of the way two drives could fail... out of those six a Raid 10 will survive 4 where as the Raid 0+1 will only survive 2.
Granted, chances of a two drive failure is SLIM (IF you are paying attention)... but it is possible.
Not sure of out of the box commercial setups available like your dlink... but they can of course be built. ;) It would essentially be a medium size computer that would be running linux (like all of these NAS's do in a sense). The added benefit to the "custom" solution is you can add more than just a NAS to your system. And you could add network cards to make it redundant networking connections or even "trunking" would be possible given other factors. Where you could share the network connection and have (in theory) 2gb network connection to the server.
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