[SOLVED] Does non-NAS Raid make sense?

[Bongert]

I was thinking about running my drives in a raid 5 setup and was looking up a bit online. My idea was to just get a SATA expansion card, chuck some drives in my tower case run them in raid 5 and call it a day. but everywhere i look i only see people talking about NAS system. I dont want to shelve out the money for a dedicated system when mine should do the job as well. Does it just not make sense to do a multi drive storage in my own case or why is everyone recommending NAS?
i should add that my PC case can fit seven drives and i wouldnt need that many if i were to go with high capacity drives.

 

[rgd1101]

You have lot of data?
what the backup plan?

 

[kanewolf]

I was thinking about running my drives in a raid 5 setup and was looking up a bit online. My idea was to just get a SATA expansion card, chuck some drives in my tower case run them in raid 5 and call it a day. but everywhere i look i only see people talking about NAS system. I dont want to shelve out the money for a dedicated system when mine should do the job as well. Does it just not make sense to do a multi drive storage in my own case or why is everyone recommending NAS?
i should add that my PC case can fit seven drives and i wouldnt need that many if i were to go with high capacity drives.

A "SATA expansion card" may not support RAID5. A dedicated RAID controller would. To support RAID5, the parity data has to be calculated in realtime. That really needs to be done in dedicated hardware. Something that a RAID card would have and a SATA card wouldn't.
Beyond that, as @rgd1101 asked "What is your disaster recovery (backup) plan?"

 

[Bongert]

A "SATA expansion card" may not support RAID5. A dedicated RAID controller would. To support RAID5, the parity data has to be calculated in realtime. That really needs to be done in dedicated hardware. Something that a RAID card would have and a SATA card wouldn't.
Beyond that, as @rgd1101 asked "What is your disaster recovery (backup) plan?"

didn't really think about that. Ive never done anything with mass storage but ill eventually need to because im torrenting a lot and the tracker im using encourages to hoard the data as to seed as much as possible. im already 3 TB in and will add a lot more in the future so i was looking into this topic as to prevent all my files to vanish in the case of drive failure.

 

[USAFRet]

didn't really think about that. Ive never done anything with mass storage but ill eventually need to because im torrenting a lot and the tracker im using encourages to hoard the data as to seed as much as possible. im already 3 TB in and will add a lot more in the future so i was looking into this topic as to prevent all my files to vanish in the case of drive failure.

Physical drive fail is only one of the ways of data loss, and not even the most common.
And that is all a RAID 5 protects against, physical drive fail.

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Bongert]

Physical drive fail is only one of the ways of data loss, and not even the most common.
And that is all a RAID 5 protects against, physical drive fail.

What is your backup situation at home?

What is your backup situation at home? And if you don't do that, why not? Every single day, I read multiple threads here of "How do I get my stuff back?" or "That drive had 5 years of photos of my kids!!" Be it a dead drive, dropped phone, virus, accidental deletion, formatting the wrong...

forums.tomshardware.com

i think just physical drive fail protection is good for the start. once i delve a bit deeper into the topic ill think of something else.

 

[USAFRet]

i think just physical drive fail protection is good for the start. once i delve a bit deeper into the topic ill think of something else.

As said above, you'd need a dedicated RAID controller for that RAID 5.
A real backup covers not only physical drive loss, but all the other forms of losing your stuff.

 

[kanewolf]

I've never done anything with mass storage but ill eventually need to because im torrenting a lot

Torrenting would be a reason to have this on a segregated host, like a NAS. That way you partition your network to put this box in the DMZ and keep it isolated from the rest of the network.