Best way to have network storage and backup

[photolabstuff]

Hello,
i need at least 4TB of image storage for my network. I have had numerous RAID failures over the years. Anyone have any suggestions to have at least 4TB of image files accessable over my network. Also, to protect the datat, what hardware to backup as well?

 

[Hawkeye22]

I've had pretty good luck with raid, but I always use raid 1 or raid 5 with no more than 4 drives. Raid 0 is terrible for recovery as there is no redundancy. I prefer raid 1 for home use. Although it consumes more disk space, I've found that most implimentations of RAID 1 can have their drives removed from the array and still work as a stand alone drive.

As for backing up, you can use an external drive or if you need to backup mutliple computers, you might consider a NAS. Of course, most NAS's use RAID also. If you need to take your data off site or just switch it out quickly, consider a drive dock, internal or external..

 

[photolabstuff]

Hawkeye22:

Thanks for your reply. I have had very poor luck with Raid arrays. I had 3 very expensive NAS's. One was a Dell Poweredge rack mount with 4 drives configured as RAID5. Another was a Iomega rack mounted also with 4 Drives as RAID5. RAID5 it seems protects only if a hard drive fails. Bot in both failures it was the OS or ppwer supply that failed and corrupted the directory requiring expensive data recovery.
So then I bought a Cisco NSS6000 rack witgh 4 2TB drives configred as RAID1 with drive 1 mirrored to 2 and 3 mirrored to 4. I thought it was very safe. NOT. Drive 1 got corrupted and copied the corruption to 2.

So, I am leaning toward taking a old PC and putting 4 drives in it and sharing each one on my network. As backup to that, setting up another PC the same way but with backup software that incrementally backs up from the first one.
Does this make sense? Anyone have any other ideas?

 

[price_th]

Buffalo makes some well ranked NAS devices. They can hold various #s of drive with different arangements. Mirror etc. That just one brand. Check Newegg for others.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Hawkeye22:

Thanks for your reply. I have had very poor luck with Raid arrays. I had 3 very expensive NAS's. One was a Dell Poweredge rack mount with 4 drives configured as RAID5. Another was a Iomega rack mounted also with 4 Drives as RAID5. RAID5 it seems protects only if a hard drive fails. Bot in both failures it was the OS or ppwer supply that failed and corrupted the directory requiring expensive data recovery.
So then I bought a Cisco NSS6000 rack witgh 4 2TB drives configred as RAID1 with drive 1 mirrored to 2 and 3 mirrored to 4. I thought it was very safe. NOT. Drive 1 got corrupted and copied the corruption to 2.

So, I am leaning toward taking a old PC and putting 4 drives in it and sharing each one on my network. As backup to that, setting up another PC the same way but with backup software that incrementally backs up from the first one.
Does this make sense? Anyone have any other ideas?

Well, a very important lesson is learned here. RAID is no substitute for a good backup plan. Raid is for redundancy so that if a drive fails the system can continue to run until you replace the defective drive. It will not save you from disk corruption, accidental deletions, or viruses.

RAID + a good backup plan can make you nearly bullet proof.