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Home Network Data Storage Device

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-do-you-recommend dept.

It happened again- a machine on my home network died. Taking with it tons of data. It's mostly backed up. No huge loss. But I finally think it's time to get some sort of network raid disk. A unified place to safely store data accessible to the numerous machines on my home lan. So now I pose to Slashdot readers- what are your recommendations? I'm looking for something with RAID and SMB sharing. At least a quarter TB, probably a half, but with some room to grow. What have you used? What works? What fails?

4 of 649 comments (clear)

  1. RAID != backup by undeadly · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It happened again- a machine on my home network died. Taking with it tons of data. It's mostly backed up. No huge loss. But I finally think it's time to get some sort of network raid disk. A unified place to safely store data accessible to the numerous machines on my home lan.

    RAID could help with downtime, but is not a substitute for backup, really. Tape backup is still very expensive (high inital cost), and DVD's are limited in both quality and storage capacity. Well, I use both, but then my storage needs are slight since I burn my most important data to a DVD-RAM disc every night.

    What OpenBSD thinks about RAID:

    RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) gives an opportunity to use multiple drives to give better performance, capacity and/or redundancy than one can get out of a single drive alone. While a full discussion of the benefits and risks of RAID are outside the scope of this article, there are a couple points that are important to make here:

    * RAID has nothing to do with backup.
    * By itself, RAID will not eliminate down-time.

    If this is new information to you, this is not a good starting point for your exploration of RAID.
  2. Re:The Poor Man's RAID Array by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Why go with RAID at all? Hear me out.

    Whatever you do, you MUST be protected from accidental deletion and corruption. That means you need a backup, which RAID is not. Now assuming you maintain a separate backup, why waste disk space on a separate "hot" backup, which RAID (not 0) provides? If this is home use, you don't care about the downtime required to restore from background in event of a disk failure.

    If you're like me, you don't want to buy a bunch of identical disks at once for home use. Instead, you have a range of larger newer disks, and smaller older disks. . This means the disks you want to use are NOT all the same size, as required by RAID (AFAIK). Instead, you can use LVM with linear mapping to combine smaller drives into one larger one, even if the physical drives are mismatched sizes. Create one logical volume for live, and one for backup, and do nightly updates of the backup. You probably don't want/need to compress the backup if the bulk of your files are already compressed media files.

  3. Re:RAID-5? BAARF! by cloudmaster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Write performance: insigificant. He said it was for archival use, so presumably it's a lot of reading and not so much writing. Besides, any reasonable RAID should be faster than a single disk, and with just two or three drives you'll be fast approaching the upper limit of gigabit ethernet (I'm presuming that Taco's house isn't wired with infiniband, though I suppose it might be).

    Multi-disk failure: Well, you can still lose your RAID-10 if two disks from the same linear array fail, so you're spending a lot of money and not really gaining a whole lot - the 33.3% figure only applies to a 4-disk RAID-10.

    If you've got 4 disks and are concerned about 2 failing, go RAID-6. You get the same capacity as the RAID-10 would get you (capacity * (n-2)), and you also have a 0% chance that 2 failed disks will take the array down. To increase capacity, you just need to add one disk at a time, too (after the initial 3), as opposed to the RAID-10, where you have to add in [at least] pairs.

  4. Solution by MikShapi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't know about all you wackos with the 600$ CPU's and 600$ RAID controllers at home, but I have better things to do with my money. Like invest it rather than spend it on useless trinkets, theoretical seek-time figures and unused gigaflops.

    Here's my brew:

    1. Old PC. Any one would do, probbably even a good'ol P1. 128MB RAM is more than enough. I consider this FREE. I run a dual-PIII-450MHz that I have lying around.
    2. 4x[BIG-SATA-DRIVE]. How big? When I built mine, highest bang-for-buck was 250GB. So I went with 4 of those.
    3. 1x PCI SATA controller.
    4. 1x PCI GbE NIC.

    [3] and [4] are peanuts. [2] is worth, what, 500$?

    The entire rig will easily give you ~10-25MB/sec, which is, for any home use I can consider including pumping 10GB files over the network, plain enough.

    Plug any crap old 2GB or greater IDE harddrive in for sport (or two and do yourself a RAID1 configuration).
    Install Linux.
    Install SAMBA.
    Configure RAID.
    Set up healthchecks that email you if something in /proc/mdstat is wrong.

    [OPTIONAL]
    1. Grab several old IDE drives. Not neccesarily same sizes.
    2. Stick them in some other box (I did it on my windoze box cuz that's where I had case space).
    3. Configure a RAID0, or better yet, a spanned volume. Use windoze dynamic disks, use LVM, whatever makes your boat float. Set up a compressed filesystem if you think that would help any. Usually, with the kind of things people store on huge arrays at home, it won't.
    4. Do a daily dump of everything from your RAID to your backup array.

    DONE. Forget about it and go do something better with your time.

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