Questions about building a SAN/NAS

[tethlah]

Currently, I have a 3.8Tb JBOD in my gaming tower that I have all my media and backups on without any redundancy that's a share so the media can be hosted to my telly using XBMC. However, I only have about 40Gb left on it and the lack of a backup makes me a bit nervous (I have about 1200 movies, 2000 telly episodes, and at least 18,000 songs). A couple years ago I picked up this case for about $100 and am finally deciding to make use of it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147165

So my question is this, I don't want to have to go buy 12 hard drives all at once. So I'm trying to figure out if there is a way that I can buy 2 or 3 HDs at a time and add them to the storage array. Is this something I can do, or do I have to have the exact number of drives and the space defined for the array when I build it? Obviously the goal is to be able to expand over time, getting bigger drives or add more drives as I need to.

How would one go about building a SAN or NAS this way?

 

[Carobthomp]

You could look into virtual hard disks (VHD) so it could dynamically expand as you need it to as more hardware is added.

 

[tethlah]

Could I do say a raid6 type protection with that? My goal is some safety but still having plenty of space. With a VHD would I simply set up my OS and then create a single VHD that I could add drives to it as it goes along?

 

[jsmithepa]

You don't have to buy 12 drives all at once, those are simply "cages" like these day you will routinely get motherboards with 8-12 SATA ports, do you need to populate all those ports? Of course not.

What u need to figure out is, what back up strategy. Do you want to back up EVERYTHING, or do you feel confident enough to just back up a "core" set of media, and with your "medium" important stuff, you can always re-rip from original media?

So this new box is going to be used for back up only?

 

[tethlah]

This is going to be a media server that will also serve as a backup for my pc. So this is going to be my only source of hosting the media as my collection is just getting to big for my computer, and I'll just host it out to the telly or any computer on my network from this box. But since I'll have the space, I figured I could also use it to backup important things like taxes, financial records, projects, database backups, etc.

 

[tethlah]

I'll have to look around when I get home, but I have a couple servers and a raid card sitting somewhere, so I think I might be able to get away with just buying drives in order to do the build, but like I said, the expanding it my primary concern. It's not like this is holding stuff I can't live without, but it would be nice to not loose it and have plenty of space in the process.

 

[jsmithepa]

If I have a nice cage like that, I would look for an energy efficient motherboard to drive it, FREENAS, which is apparently free. Each HD takes ~2amp to spin up so am letting you compute the size of the PSU.

You will hear lots of folks recommending RAID configuration, but to me RAID is for people who can't tolerate any downtime. My personal need is not that critical so I have adopted a simple "2nd backup" method of my core medias only.

I personally have a 4-bay and currently 2 bays are occupied, I don't expect using more than 1 of those bays for back up as I back up and eject.