Storage suggestions?

At present, I have augmented the disk drives in my PC with three external USB2 drives.

Each of these has their own individual power supplies, and they take up IRQs, so plugging in more devices gives rise to IRQ problems, plus there's a veritable snake-pit of loose wires.

And it can only get worse.

So I'm trying to think of an economical, scaleable, tidy, alternative.

NAS devices with Gigabit ethernet look promising, but are not especially cheap. In fact, a simple server pc with lots of drive bays might be a better proposition.

Anybody got any ideas?

G

I went the server way,its a big bulky thing i got cheap of ebay,its crammed full of hard drives,1.5tb,but if i could go back id go the other way and just buy large hard drives and a couple of raid cards.

I don't understand what you mean by buying large hard drives and RAID cards.

Wouldn't they need to be located either in the computer (so you're back to using a server), or in a NAS enclosure which would have its own RAID card.

Or do you mean buy a new, fast, PC with the capacity to hold several drives? In which case, wouldn't RAID be on the motherboard?

I'm not very well-informed on this subject, hence my question.

G

I dont know if its normal or not,but my pc has space for 6 drives inside. I run 2 off the onboard port which leaves me 4 free. A pci raid card allows you to run 2 more drives,so with 2 cards i could run 4 drives. If i was to do it again id go down this road filling the case with 500gb drives giving me at least 2tb,a possible 3tb all inside the case nice and neat.

I find myself using alot of firewire "mybook" drives these daze.

OK, I get you. So I can simply add a RAID board, and slot in as many drives as I have room for? I might perhaps need a new case, with a good power supply.

G

And enough space between the drives to let air move, and some fans to move it.

Good point.

G

This is the sort of thing i had in mind,you could infact run two drives off one cable thus giving you a possible 4 drives off one card.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ultra-ata-ide-controller-card_W0QQitemZ220124654428QQihZ012QQcategoryZ90714QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

And yes you would need to increase your cooling capacity.

I don't think I'd go for any IDE drive any more, now that SATA is so well established, and no more expensive.

Current motherboards priced below £100 have 6 SATA connections already, with no need to go to add-on cards. They'll have RAID on board, so you'd be able to pair up the drives for redundancy.

Putting more than 6 drives in a case is getting a bit specialist anyway, and even with 6 you'd be generating a fair amount of heat to worry about.

How much data do you actually need to keep, George? How much of it changes, how often? How much of it really needs to be instantly available?

It may be that 'cheap no good, and good no cheap'.

Not sure how complicated you want to get but I have heard of (but not done myself) people getting high capacity cases like

http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/125072/rb/0

and just using them as an extrenal drive bay. Sata does allow you moderate cable lengths. I think you still have to use one large powersupply though or a pair of powersupplies designed to be connected.

It would be quite loud though and generate plenty of heat.

Alternatively a Serial attached SCSI storage array would be nice, trouble is at work we have just been quoted £6500 for one

If you go the onboard raid array route you should check what it is compatible with as I believe some of them can be very picky if you have to replace the motherboard.

Personally I relegated my old PC to fileserver duties, that way the important stuff can be saved on 2 computers (And its in the shed so I cant hear it)

How about a RAID NAS? No need to set up anything complicated, practically plug in and go.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm really looking to be able to archive a lot of images and some video files cheaply.

I don't expect to be burgled, or for the house to burn down, so I think that the most convenient way to safely store data is on hard disks, with each original file on one set of disks and a copy on another.

Obviously there are several possible solutions, but I don't want to spend more than I need to.

Because the disks will not be used very intensively I don't expect them to get massively hot, or for them all to be running at once. I'll probably set them to be powered down after 20 minutes of non-use, so most of the time they will be taking no current and generating no heat.

That means I should be safe enough with up to to six drives in one case.

G

I knew someone who had a RAID array consisting of a couple of drives mirrored.

The house didn't burn down, but the PSU developed a fault and caused a fire inside the case, which trashed both disks, and vented a lot of smoke out through the exhaust fan.

Personally, I wouldn't use the word "safely" in conjunction with any solution that has all the data inside one case. Or even one building, really - but you pays your money and you takes your choice. There's no single right answer to this one, sadly. Like how good a picture is, "safe enough" is very much in the eye of the beholder.

What we really need is holographic disks 300GB to start, moving to 2TB over a couple of years, same reader/writer so no need to upgrade.

I hate all storage technology as it is all capable of failing horribly.

I'm going to start to print all the photos I want to keep every month or so and keep them somewhere 'safe'.


At the moment I have 2 disks in my main machine one for backups as well as an external 320GB disk for second backups. Problem is I have 2x100GB in my machine which means I'll need a new backup drive to back up my backup when I fill both drives.