mdogg

Yea i've heard a lot of good things about drobo too...Looks a bit expensive though
I should have mentioned this earlier but this is going to be NAS. I already have written a few scripts to do the backuping up and whatnot so the problem for me right now is whether or not I should invest in RAID.

I dunno RAID 1 seems like a good idea, except I need more than 1TB of storage, and I don't want want to buy 4TBs to put in RAID 1.

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atlas_nathan

I always recommend this to people when they build their first large storage server - invariably, they don't listen until they've already lost data.

Don't use RAID5 (or 6).

With 3 1TB hard drives, you are nearing the neighborhood of statistical certainty that a bit will fail to be read correctly during a rebuild - as a result, the array will be marked as corrupt and go offline.

Add more disks, and you are begging for trouble.

There are two RAID levels you need in life - and only two. RAID 1, and RAID 10.

As for backups - backups are a different story entirely. You should never begin a project with the intention of using the backups someday, anymore than you would build a boat with the intention of using the liferafts. They are there, they keep you safe, and you hope to god that the numerous safeguards you have put in place will keep you from ever needing to touch them.

How much storage do you need, anyways?

mdogg

Well my entire music and dvd collection which should be around 1TB, but will definitely grow w/ hd content

-All of our data for cloud access ~1TB

-Then my pictures which are around 50GB and growing [this is extremely critical, I've already lost 2 years of pictures before]


So basically I need around 3TB


Thanks again guys.

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Some stuff I made

Good Linux Users Don’t Talk About Microsoft

Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.– Linus Torvalds

WBAGAM

RAID is not backup.

dump your one disk to an off-site storage.

if you cant have downtime then do raid1. but backup and RAID are not to go together. they work with and for each other.

mdogg

I understand that RAID is not backup, however it DOES protect against hard drive failures. what BLinux said was on the money. I want RAID only because I don't want to have to push my data from amazon S3 just in case. (sorry but I'm very cynical about hard drives)

Thanks a lot guys for your help, you've helped me make my decision.
2TB in RAID 10 (4x1TB)!!

__________________
Some stuff I made

Good Linux Users Don’t Talk About Microsoft

Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.– Linus Torvalds