Here's my controversial new stance. RAID of any sort is ridiculous overkill for home media. Here's why:
- buying three or more drives to do RAID-5 means you are buying, and paying, for capacity you won't use any time soon. If you spend two years waiting to "grow into" your RAID-5 volume (eg. fill it up), you've probably overpaid for all the unused storage by 25-40%. Conversely, if you right size a RAID-5 array, you are throwing money away in a couple of years again when you have to buy more drives.
- no RAID system is going to protect against file system corruption. It's no fun dealing with cross-linked and corrupted files, and RAID-5, RAID-1, whatever, will happily redundantly copy that corruption across your storage.
- no home media library needs the kind of real-time redundancy that RAID provides. If you can recover the lost or damaged media caused by drive failure in a day, you are doing fine. So there is no need to keep extra data spinning in a highly-available array. This is movies and MP3's, not your bank info.
So what would I do instead? I would do one of two things:
1. Buy a nice LTO tape system for the same price as a decent NAS system, and be able to backup, and restore, all my data from a tape or two. (if you've never used LTO, you have no idea how nice it is; it's fast, reliable, compact, and data-dense, you don't need many tapes to handle a ton of data)
2. Use Time Machine (on a Mac) or something like Acronis on the PC to keep your media drives backed up to a second drive. This avoids the single point of failure in file system corruption, and still ensures I have a copy of the data on each of the live drives. My time machine backups, for example, run once daily - I don't need hourly backups of my media because it doesn't change that often. If a drive dies, I replace it, and I fire up time machine, and I have my media back same day.
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-Scott
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