Enterprise Drives Needed for External Backup?

[explodingpens]

I am building a Windows Server Essentials 2012 machine for my dad’s office. Its intended use is backup of network client data as well as handling of our accounting software. This is my first time working with a server, so I’ll need some help to get it right.

I’m planning a RAID setup, obviously using enterprise class drives for storage, to which I will backup all clients in the network. This will in turn be backed up to external usb drives which will be rotated with ones at an off-site location.

We use rather a lot of data for such a small office, so storage will be a significant cost for us. I would not skimp out on the drives within the server, but given the amount of data they collectively comprise, each external drive would probably need to be about 3TB to comfortably store it all.

Enterprise drives of that size are rather expensive and I’d need several for off-site rotation. The demands on these drives would be fairly low: nightly backups of data already redundantly stored would be the only operations performed on them. So would it be completely idiotic to go with consumer grade hard drives for this purpose?

 

[RealBeast]

I would be more concerned with using a USB connected drive than whether you necessarily use an enterprise drive for that purpose. Just scan through this forum for data lost on USB connected drives. If you use USB it must only be disconnected after ejecting it from Windows every time, and not hot disconnected.

Even Enterprise drives fail, although less often, but as long as you can reconstruct the data at a reasonable cost without affecting operations, the choice is a cost benefit choice. Either way you cannot rely 100% on any single drive, but perhaps your offsite backup rotation accounts for this risk.

 

[explodingpens]

The server I’m considering is a Fujitsu Primergy TX100 S3P, which comes well-reviewed at an excellent price. Two harddrives are included, with guaranteed next day replacement from Fujitsu, should either fail. However, it has no eSATA ports and no front-mounted drives, hot plugged or otherwise. If backing up through USB is a bad idea, I have to wonder how one is supposed to back that thing up outside of some sort of NAS solution (which strikes me as impractical for off-site rotation).

Does the ejection requirement apply with write caching disabled? Assuming all backups run at night, is there then really any risk to swapping them 'hot' during the day?

I realize enterprise drives, and hard drives in general, are prone to failure. But user data would exist on client machines, mirrored RAID drives on the server, and the multiple aforementioned off-site external hard drives. It seems redundant enough to me, at least.