Saleavitt10 Loc: Maine

Considering setting up a Raid system to store my growing photography collection. I’d like to get rid of the multiple external hard drives that currently hold the collection. I’d love to hear from those of you that use a Raid. Why you chose the one you have, etc.

Thanks in advance.

Jimcamera Loc: Michigan

Drobo. It is easy to install, double redundancy and can hold up to 5 hard drives of different capacities. Check it out.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I have a Synology NAS box with two 3 TB Red drives, and I wish I had gotten 4 TB. I use RAID 1, with each disk being a copy of the other. I could have gone with two separate entries (RAID 0), giving me a total of 6 TB, but this way is safer, and that's the whole point of a backup.

https://www.diffen.com/difference/RAID_0_vs_RAID_1

I use SyncBackSE as my backup program.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

Related issue. I am also considering a RAID. Do any of you routinely swap out a drive and put it in a remote location? I am considering doing a RAID and periodically (monthly?) putting a copy in our safe deposit box or even just in a metal box in my car.

abc1234 Loc: Elk Grove Village, Illinois

The purpose of RAID is backing up drives by mirroring them. It is not about increasing capacity. Do you want to protect your storage or increase it?

abc1234 Loc: Elk Grove Village, Illinois

I never swapped them out. I saw no need to do so. But I found using something like carbonite the way to go for backing up data safely, off-site and immediately. You might want to reexamine what your needs are.

cytafex Loc: Clarksburg MA

I have a Raid 0 set up internally in Mac Pro with 4-2TB Cruial SSD's yielding 8TB storage, very fast and then I clone them on 2-8TB hard drives externally.

abc1234 Loc: Elk Grove Village, Illinois

I forgot to mention this. You can buy a RAID PCI card and manage the drives internally. Make sure you have proper ventilation. Cytafex, do you mirror or clone the external drives?

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

You use a RAID to increase the MTBF of your local drives. It does not help in your archiving, which requires distribution to be effective.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

I would rather not have to pay $100 bucks or more a year for something I can do myself and control locally.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

abc1234 Loc: Elk Grove Village, Illinois

Thank you.

Saleavitt10 Loc: Maine

My purpose is to protect my files by having the redundancy a properly raid system will give me. I have offsite storage of backup drives but want to have “backups” locally available as well.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

For industrial-strength arrays - Synology is the gold standard. Many of their boxes are scalable. You can use a traditional RAID array - I recommend striped/mirrored as in RAID 1+0 - so you have mirroring for redundancy and striping for performance. This requires a minimum of 4 drives, two of which are redundant. This scheme is the safest of all, which would put your data at risk only if you have 2 drive failures. Or you can use Synology's proprietary RAID which is more economical on drives - or with the same number of drives you can have access to more space.

I like this much more than the Drobo et al solutions. Synology has a reputation for customer service and solid products.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

The purpose of RAID is NOT backup. The primary goal of RAID is to provide Fault Tolerance and a)redundancy (mirroring), and b)increased performance (striping a single logical drive volume across multiple physical drives), by designating one or more parity drives to striped components. The whole point is to minimize downtime and keep data accessible. This is not a backup strategy, but a part of one.

In a quality external RAID box, not only are there redundant drives, but the box will also have redundant power supplies, I/O ports, etc to insure against data loss. When multiple I/0 ethernet ports are provided, the custom is to do port aggregation - where multiple ports are ganged together to provide a wider data path and faster I/O. All of these things, are hot swappable ie you don't have to shut down the appliance to replace failed components. Mirroring is an extremely inefficient use of multiple drives - but it is pretty safe. I use RAID 1+0 which is mirroring AND striping, for faster read-writes.

The scalability of RAID makes it ideal when you need to add capacity. You don't even have to shut down the system or copy things from one drive to another to increase capacity in a properly implemented array.