Setting up an external HDD stack

[lolisamurai]

Hello, I'm planning on setting up some kind of external storage device made up of multiple HDDs that would allow me to:
- Access all of the hdd's as a single storage device
- Add more HDDs if more storage is needed
- Take advantage of raid for faster writing / reading speed if possible
- Use half of the HDDs to back up everything in case one of the HDD's fails

Basically, a stack of HDDs that I can extend to safely store as much data as I want and access it from all of the PCs in my home network.

What would be the best way to set up something like this? Also, what would be the best way to access it with the highest possible read/write speeds?

 

[leeb2013]

a 4 bay NAS is a ready made solution to do just that.

 

[lolisamurai]

I had a feeling there were ready made solutions but I had no idea what the thing I needed was called, lol thanks I'm looking into these. Will let you know if it suits my needs.

 

[lolisamurai]

Yep, just what I needed! Thanks!

 

[TyrOd]

a 4 bay NAS is a ready made solution to do just that.

Um, no...
A single 4-bay NAS won't serve as a dedicated backup where... "Use half of the HDDs to back up everything in case one of the HDD's fails"

The NAS can accomplish redundancy if a drive fails, but you'll still need a dedicated backup.

You can accomplish this with a second NAS or external drives connected to the NAS.

Preferably you'll also want to have another off-site backup by rotating external drives or through a cloud backup.

 

[lolisamurai]

a 4 bay NAS is a ready made solution to do just that.

Um, no...
A single 4-bay NAS won't serve as a dedicated backup where... "Use half of the HDDs to back up everything in case one of the HDD's fails"

The NAS can accomplish redundancy if a drive fails, but you'll still need a dedicated backup.

You can accomplish this with a second NAS or external drives connected to the NAS.

Preferably you'll also want to have another off-site backup by rotating external drives or through a cloud backup.

Uh after researching on NAS I think that setting up a NAS with 4 HDD's on RAID5 would be enough as long as I always keep a spare HDD around to replace the one that fails. I only need to protect myself against hard drive failures.

 

[USAFRet]

A RAID is only protection against a drive failure. Fire, flood, theft, corruption, accidental deletion, virus.....RAID does nothing to protect against that.

You also need an actual back up.

 

[TyrOd]

A RAID is only protection against a drive failure. Fire, flood, theft, corruption, accidental deletion, virus.....RAID does nothing to protect against that.

You also need an actual back up.

Yep, there's also things like controller failure/corruption, which is just as likely as disk failure.

RAID doesn't protect you against MOST data loss situations.