Potentially "infinite" storage?

[maxence822]

Hello!
I had an idea of connecting multiple hard drives through RAID configurations in order to have a potentially infinite storage space for video surveillance means where the video camera would be connected to a computer that would then put the information on the hard drive RAID storage and would not have to be replaced every month or so. So how do I set up RAID? What do I need? Which kind of RAID would you recommend? Also what is the maximum amount of storage I could have on my computer with Asus M5A99FX Pro R2.0 Motherboard. Let's say that money is not a concern.
Thank you!
Maxence822

 

[USAFRet]

'potentially infinite'

You probably don't need a RAID. I think what you're considering is a large scale RAID 0, where all drives are seen as one volume.
You don't need or want that for a surveillance system.

You have to figure out a few things first:
How much data, per day or week, is the system capturing?
How long do you want to keep old video or images?

Many current consumer grade security cam DVR systems simply overwrite old files as the drive fills up.The user does not have to do anything. Depending on size and resolution, this may be a week, a month, whatever.
Just need a larger drive for more data.

An easy way is to simply set up a daily or weekly copy function to another drive.
"Every Saturday morning at 3AM, copy all from the primary drive to the secondary."
When the secondary fills up, swap it out. The primary stays in there, just getting overwritten as the system sees fit.

But how much do you actually want to save for direct access, and for how long?

 

[maxence822]

This is more of an experiment to see how much I could store without having to constantly manipulate and "swap" drives. So I'm wondering how I would set up the RAID and how much I could potentially store on there. The video surveillance is just an example of something this could be used for, since it could be used with a user who has no technological expertise and would therefore not know how to swap his/her drive.

 

[USAFRet]

Well....eventually it WILL run out of space. Or a drive will die.
And with a RAID 0, you can't just slot in a new drive if more space is needed. And if one of them dies (and all drives die eventually), all data on all of them is gone.

Possibly a Drobo or similar. Plug and play new larger drives (mostly).

But there is no 'infinite'. Think back 10 years. A 20GB drive was BIG. Today, you can get multiples of that in a chip the size of your fingernail.

How much data are you capturing weekly or monthly? Scale appropriately.

 

[USAFRet]

Or, some cloud function. Upload daily(?), and let the big guys take care of 'infinite'.

 

[maxence822]

Well im getting movies and video games and music i change my library a lot so id say no more than 1-200 GB a month. Probably less. But the whole thing is an experiment. Could i possibly do a RAID 10 configuration with 4 or 6 drives? I just want to do this as sort of a DIY massive storage thing and to learn how to set up RAID

 

[USAFRet]

Well...that's a whole different thing than what you asked initially.

1-200GB/month...just add a new 2 or 3TB drive a year.
You can play with the RAID 10 situation if you choose.

 

[maxence822]

The thing i asked initially was for a friend of mine who wants to do camera surveillance and have a way of not having to switch out the hard drives every month. He uses about 2tb a month from video surveillance so im wondering if its possible to put a ton of hard drives together so he doesnt have to switch anything out for about 2 years, preferrably for a very very long time

 

[popatim]

With a 32 port sas expander and win8's storage spaces and using Hitachi's new 10TB drives you have a potential 320TB of space and since moneys no object of course that means adding in another expander adds another potential 320tb of space. You would naturally need to couple the expanders thru an appropriate controller card

 

[maxence822]

Ok thanks a lot I will think of that

 

[entropy4money]

Potential infinite storage? what happened to the 2nd law of thermodynamics! *hint: my nickname

 

[maxence822]

Potential infinite storage? what happened to the 2nd law of thermodynamics! *hint: my nickname

Lol Well what I meant was not infinite its more so massively huge that no one would ever go above that limit.

 

[entropy4money]

Potential infinite storage? what happened to the 2nd law of thermodynamics! *hint: my nickname

Lol Well what I meant was not infinite its more so massively huge that no one would ever go above that limit.

I know I am just joking. What is infinity after all... a very large number, it is relative. anyway, I am glad you found a solution.

 

[TyrOd]

The thing i asked initially was for a friend of mine who wants to do camera surveillance and have a way of not having to switch out the hard drives every month. He uses about 2tb a month from video surveillance so im wondering if its possible to put a ton of hard drives together so he doesnt have to switch anything out for about 2 years, preferrably for a very very long time

There is no scenario where 50+ Tb of storage is needed where you won't need to switch out drives within 2 years.
All hard drives eventually fail and regardless of the RAID level, you'll need to replace drives when they fail and deal with significantly read/write performance while the rebuild is going on.

Even if 50TB drives existed, you'd have no guarantee that drive won't fail within the 2 year period.
Further, RAID isn't a backup so if you really want to keep ANY of that recorded data, you'll need to back it up somewhere and that requires REGULAR validation to maintain reliability.

There's no magical world where you can have 50+TB of storage and not have to maintain it regularly. this is why storage related services are a much bigger market than the storage hardware.

 

[maxence822]

Ya that makes sense thanks! What about with solid state drives? If I had 32 solid state drives in RAID 10 would that work better?

 

[maxence822]

Imagine the price tag on that.....

 

[TyrOd]

Ya that makes sense thanks! What about with solid state drives? If I had 32 solid state drives in RAID 10 would that work better?

Solid state drives have average annual failure rates between 3-5% so you'll likely still need to replace a couple of drives within that 2 year period.

Further, you have no way of knowing where on the bell curve of failure rates your particular set of 32 drives will fall, so there's no guarantee that they won't require replacement ore often.