Once again I am reviewing how I store my data. Recently I had 2 HD's die in my Synology array (The 2nd during the rebuild of the first failure), luckily I've salvaged every bit of data I had and all is ok. So my current strategy seems to work.

But I am near capacity of my backup server. I'd like to use these drives...

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/products/enterprise-servers-storage/nearline-storage/archive-hdd/

...to make a large Cold Data Archive as most of the data I store long term is never looked at again, but I occasionally have a client come back to me years down the line after they have lost their wedding photographs.

My questions is, if the recommendation is to use these drives one their own how do I best use them to create one big pool? I'd like to use 4 of them ideally.

Cheers

Cris

I have had one of those 8TB drives in my MythTV box for the past couple of months. Too new to know about long-term reliability, but thus far it has been fast(!) and invisible (no issues).

It sits there long with three 4TB WD Green drives in a mhddfs array. Being the newest/largest drive, it attracts most of the I/O, and has been getting a pretty good workout.

Cheers

From the information Seagate have about it, and what I read in the reviews, it's not recommended to be used in a NAS? I assume the only reason for that would be write speeds?

I was thinking of a Raid 0 array, I'm thinking that space is more important that redundancy as it's a backup of a RAID system that already has redundancy. So would these drives be ok in that sort of setup? I could just get another 4/5 bay Synology and fill it with these in that case.

Cheers

Cris

Write speeds thus far have been excellent. It's no SSD, but it is faster than the non-shingled 4TB WD Green drives.

There was a review online (lost the link) where somebody specifically tested that aspect, and his conclusion was "blazingly quick most of the time". Rewriting small files over and over did slow it down though.

I'm not a fan of any of the common RAID formats on multi-terrabyte drives for small systems use. The rebuild times and chances of multiple simultaneous failures are just too big.

A better solution is needed for small systems use. Something like UnRAID or mhddfs. Pity neither of those isn't more widely available for MSWin or OS/X. Or even for Linux: they exist, people like me use them, but not widely out there.

"JBOD" would be good, except it also takes the RAID approach of "a single drive failure kills the entire array". Ugh.

RAID0 at least doesn't have "rebuild" issues -- everything is lost on failure of any drive, so less time wasted restoring it than (say) RAID1 or RAID5.

EDIT: Say, what about something like ZFS ?

Cheers

I have ZFS running on the FreeNAS server that this setup would replace.

I am really impressed with the Synology package, my existing box has been excellent. Very easy to use for a numbskull like me and if you do loose a drive it seems very good at rebuilding or allowing you to access data while the drive is failing. Worked for me as I didn't loose a thing! I have it double backed up of course, but that isn't the point there

So you think they will be fine used as normal drives then?

Cheers

Cris

You should give XPnology a look then. It's the official Synology software, which seems to be open source, so you can use it on any system. For free. That way it's very easy (and cheap) to make a great NAS with excellent software.

The other option is indeed (as Mark states) unRAID. I've been using it for several years now and it never failed me. The nice part is, if only one disk fails, it can rebuild. If more fail, the array is toast, but you can still pull the data of every independent disk that isn't broken. So nothing is ever completely lost. (unless your system is struck by lightning or something).


I'm no expert, but I would think yes.

Have you looked at Amazon Glacier? The volumes you're storing might make this cost-prohibitive, but it's explicitly designed for long-term storage of rarely-accessed data.

I have looked at solutions like that before. I am currently storing around 16Tb and that is growing at a steady rate. It's cost and upload time that prevents it from being workable. Shame as I really like the idea of it.

I guess what I'd really like is a similar solution to Amazon Glacier but locally.

Cheers

Cris