Home Media Server - JBOD or NAS?

[HeartsOfFire]

Gentlemen!!!

Recently I took advantage of an exceptional deal at tigerdirect, and purchased a 640 GB USB hard drive for $70. It's served me well. I use it to store video. TV shows, Movies, DVDs and the like.

But now I must ask for advice.

The hard drive is now over 50% of its capacity, and I'm giving some strong thought into purchasing a storage system that will allow for seamless capacity integration without sacrificing redundancy in the unlikely event of a hard drive failure.

Should I go with RAID5 configured NAS? Or would a Media Server be wiser?

[photon]

The thing with most home NAS you'll be pretty limited with expandability unless you spend more $$. I mean if you go with a 4 bay system and do 2 TB with 3 x 1 TB drives in RAID5, adding the 4th drive will only get you a 50% increase, and then you are done unless you swap out the drives for bigger ones.

To alleviate this you can either get a device with a lot more slots (there are 6 and 8 slot devices out there), or you can get a more expensive device that allows migration to bigger drives without having to rebuild from scratch (http://www.qnap.com/pro_features_RLM.asp).

If you went with a Windows Media server I think the software RAID and drive management has more flexibility in adding storage seamlessly, but I'm not positive about that.

For myself I just resigned myself to having to swap out the drives every few years, so I went with a 2 drive unit and mirrored the drives. I recently went from 320GB to 1.5TB drives.

[sclitheroe]

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.

[photon]

Good point about the file system, but how much of a threat is file system corruption with ext2 file system though? How much more or less likely compared to a drive failure?

I use RAID1 on my NAS because it's the file server for my house.. it has all my photos, my financial documents, invoices... all the critical stuff that I'd be scared to lose if my main PC drive died. Not so much real time redundancy but just inexpensive hedging against drive failure.

The only flaw with tapes is unless you take the tapes offsite, you are still susceptible to a catastrophic event like a fire or a flood or theft or something

So have PC's backup to the NAS which has RAID1 to help protect against a drive failure, and then use a tape or similar system taken offsite, or an online backup service, to protect against file system corruption or fire/flood/theft.

I think some NAS devices are starting to partner with or provide their own online backup providers.

Seems like overkill, but I know way too many people who have lost all their photos of their kids, or years of important financial info, because of poor or nonexistent backups.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by photon

Good point about the file system, but how much of a threat is file system corruption with ext2 file system though? How much more or less likely compared to a drive failure?

I use RAID1 on my NAS because it's the file server for my house.. it has all my photos, my financial documents, invoices... all the critical stuff that I'd be scared to lose if my main PC drive died. Not so much real time redundancy but just inexpensive hedging against drive failure.

The only flaw with tapes is unless you take the tapes offsite, you are still susceptible to a catastrophic event like a fire or a flood or theft or something

So have PC's backup to the NAS which has RAID1 to help protect against a drive failure, and then use a tape or similar system taken offsite, or an online backup service, to protect against file system corruption or fire/flood/theft.

I think some NAS devices are starting to partner with or provide their own online backup providers.

Seems like overkill, but I know way too many people who have lost all their photos of their kids, or years of important financial info, because of poor or nonexistent backups.

I experienced a major incident with cross-linked files on a HFS+ volume, which is pretty rare - it can and does happen. I've also had my share of filesystem issues in Linux over the years. And I've worked on plenty of NT/2000/2003/2008 servers that have corrupted NTFS partitions....

In addition to the onsite backups I have, I also use Mozy to keep my stuff backed up offsite - you are preaching the truth when you say people either have, or will, lose data because of a lack of backups. RAID is not backup. Hard drives sitting on a shelf are not offsite backup (unless its a shelf somewhere else)

[Shazam]

Drives are cheap. Might as well set up RAID1. RAID5 is useless.

[GoinAllTheWay]

How about a Windows Home Server?

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Product...23988(ME).aspx

Decent little package can be picked up from Memory Express for $320 for the box and software. If you have a spare rig kicking around, you can buy the operating system standalone for $140.

Far more functionality then NAS, room to expand and a ton of other addins that make it a great little unit for home use.