Chris Wilson Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I seem to be having a torrid time with conventional hard drives of late, and have lost some treasured, if only sentimental, data. My latest failure, and these have been on different machines, was a Seagate 1 tb drive, sold as suitable for CCTV work, and advertised as an "Enterprise" drive. I used it to back up my e-mail once a night, and my desktop and browser settings. I also backed up another e-mail accounts data, so we are talking 25 gig plus database sizes for one and 10 gig for the other. I use Second Copy, one database is written verbatim, the smaller one, and the other big one incrementally. The drive, and in fact the PC it is within are less than 6 months old. I can see all the data on the storage drive, and use it, but if I try and copy paste it to another drive it starts to do this, then just, puff, it's disappeared and not to be seen in the Windows 7 Pro 64 bit "My Computer" or in the OS's disk management tools. A reboot has so far seen the drive restored, but it has me worried. I seem to be able to transfer small amounts of data off it, but it vanishes after a minute or so of shifting large folders. Using drive Properties / Tools to do a check disk and repair it starts off fast then suddenly stops, occasionally restarting tediously slowly, until again the drive just vanishes. Data recovery aside, and within reason cost aside, what currently available drives are ultra reliable in this sort of scenario, for backing up to? I am not worried about speed, and am happy to pay something of a a premium for reliability. The OS is on an SSD drive, but such is the size of modern user's databases the need for 1 gig sort of volume SSD's makes their cost pretty prohibitive. Should I be backing up to some sort of array or RAID? Is backing up this sort of volume every single night, with the PC permanently on, abnormal for "domestic" hard drives? I notice the D drive I store on shuts down after a while if not accessed, and has always taken a while to gird its loins and get going again. Sleeping I think it's called, is this worse than leaving it going 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year? Personally I'd prefer a media far more reliable than a perhaps 10 year old drive might be in the future, but almost unbelievably to me, a simple PC *USER* there appears to be no real large volume storage medium save some optically written discs, which might need dozens of them to store a few terrabytes of stuff. Thank you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Virus Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 go for raid 1, mirroring if your system can handle it. It slows everything down alot though. Before attempting to setup raid, make sure your system supports it. RAID 5 might be worth reading into aswell What kind of OS are you using? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Wilson Posted March 19, 2015 Author Share Posted March 19, 2015 Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. My home network is all hard wired, I neither have, nor want Wi-Fi. As an aside I have a probable unfounded fear of Cloud storage, because I can see companies going under, and also wouldn't me being out in the sticks on a pitifully slow connection make uploading this volume of data be unbearably slow? Thanks for the help, appreciated! What's a NAS box? Could one be used for storage / backup, and can you do a mirror set up on one? Cheers. I'll dig my motyherboard book out and have a look about what it supports. I assume it's down to the MB? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grahamc Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Look at either cloud backup or RAID based devices. RAID will cost more as you basically have drives being used for nothing but a copy of the data, but well worth it. I use Synology Diskstation at home. https://www.synology.com/en-global/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thorin Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 It sounds like you aren't going to need terabytes and terabytes of storage, so a small 2 bay disk enclosure (I like Synology stuff) running RAID1 (mirrored) config might be suitable. You'd be protected against a single drive failure, but if this just used as a backup of data you've already got on your main computer, you might only decide to go with a single drive anyway. Depends on how much resilience you want to pay for. As for hard drive reliability, there's more info than you could possibly want to know here https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/ I'm currently using a few 3TB Western Digital Red drives, but it seems they have a higher rate of failure than newer Seagate or Hitachi. I'm not too concerned as they should last a lot longer in my environment than in enterprise use! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grahamc Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I used to run 2 of these at home, but have since moved up to the DiskStation. Still have one and 4x 500GB drives at home that I am not using http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/GP1372-NAS-Enclosure-for-4-x-3-5-SATA-HDD-Gigabit-Ethernet-Port-Quad-Drives-/200778272125?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item2ebf514d7d Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Wilson Posted March 19, 2015 Author Share Posted March 19, 2015 Before posting, as i was optimistically hoping to back the damned thing up, I ordered one of these: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-437-WD but not from Overclockers. Good choice? Should I get a second one and make a RAID mirror? Cheers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Get a 4 bay NAS device. QNAP, Netgear, Synology. Fit, 4x 2Tb 5400RPM drives (low speed high reliability). Nothing trick like SSD's or Hybrids in a NAS. Then set them up as a RAID5. Stick to brands with warranties long enough to claim on. RAID 5 allows you to lose a disk and the other 3 hold enough data to recover it, so when you stick the new one in it gets added to the array by the system automatically. It's good for performance and safety. Raid 6 and 10 offer similar but I don't think they are required in less that 6 disk arrays. Happy to spec you something if you wish. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thorin Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Budget Synology 2-bay enclosures, you'll need disks to add... http://www.dabs.com/products/synology-ds214se-2-bay-desktop-nas-92X2.html?q=synology&src=12 http://www.dabs.com/products/synology-ds215j-2-bay-desktop-nas-9Y7J.html?q=synology&src=12 The first one is an older 3Gb/s SATA interface, the second one is £30 more but supports 6 Gb/s. For a simple backup drive it isn't likely to matter to you. I really think 4 bay enclosures and RAID5 is overkill for what you'll want. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Meh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ManwithSupra Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I wouldn't and dont use SATA drives in any business application unless it was archive only and running at least Raid 5. SATA drives are just too unreliable in general, yes they are cheap but thats because they are essentially crap. Don't be fooled by NL SAS, its a SATA drive with a SAS connector and a SAS algorithm, still poor on performance and reliability but better than normal SATA. Full blown SAS drives are more expensive for a reason...better performing and much much much better reliability. If you dont want hassle choose SAS drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grahamc Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Budget Synology 2-bay enclosures, you'll need disks to add... http://www.dabs.com/products/synology-ds214se-2-bay-desktop-nas-92X2.html?q=synology&src=12 http://www.dabs.com/products/synology-ds215j-2-bay-desktop-nas-9Y7J.html?q=synology&src=12 The first one is an older 3Gb/s SATA interface, the second one is £30 more but supports 6 Gb/s. For a simple backup drive it isn't likely to matter to you. I really think 4 bay enclosures and RAID5 is overkill for what you'll want. RAID5 is more cost effective than RAID1 as you will be losing 1 disk out of 2 QUAD is the ONLY way Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ManwithSupra Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 RAID5 is more cost effective than RAID1 as you will be losing 1 disk out of 2 QUAD is the ONLY way Raid 5 performs very poorly and all performance goes out of the window when rebuilding the array after an inevitable SATA disk failure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grahamc Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Raid 5 performs very poorly and all performance goes out of the window when rebuilding the array after an inevitable SATA disk failure. Yes, at enterprise level, but for home office use its not bad. Must admit I am spoilt at work since we run PureSAN but cant recommend that for home use. I have run 3 RAID5 NAS at home for the last 8 years and I have not had a single issue with any of them. Latest being the Synology.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ManwithSupra Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Yes, at enterprise level, but for home office use its not bad. Must admit I am spoilt at work since we run PureSAN but cant recommend that for home use. I have run 3 RAID5 NAS at home for the last 8 years and I have not had a single issue with any of them. Latest being the Synology.... Ha yeah I suppose for a single home office it should be ok Sorry, I got lost in the moment there, it wouldn't have been long until I would be saying nah you need a 7450c all flash 3PAR array Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Wilson Posted March 19, 2015 Author Share Posted March 19, 2015 I wouldn't and dont use SATA drives in any business application unless it was archive only and running at least Raid 5. SATA drives are just too unreliable in general, yes they are cheap but thats because they are essentially crap. Don't be fooled by NL SAS, its a SATA drive with a SAS connector and a SAS algorithm, still poor on performance and reliability but better than normal SATA. Full blown SAS drives are more expensive for a reason...better performing and much much much better reliability. If you dont want hassle choose SAS drives. I need to Google SAS, it means nothing to me, but the important question is "how much"? And where do you get them? Cheers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grahamc Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Ha yeah I suppose for a single home office it should be ok Sorry, I got lost in the moment there, it wouldn't have been long until I would be saying nah you need a 7450c all flash 3PAR array That could actually work Chris, whats the budget? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ManwithSupra Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 That could actually work Chris, whats the budget? Oh it would work for sure... maybe just a little overkill - - - Updated - - - I need to Google SAS, it means nothing to me, but the important question is "how much"? And where do you get them? Cheers. If you are only looking at a small amount of Data then 300GB SAS drives are pretty well priced at the moment. You will also need to look at installing a SAS controller as I doubt your MB will support SAS. Drive about £120 and controllers can be anything from, £80 to getting on for a grand, for your use though the entry level cards (around £80-140) should be ok. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grahamc Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Oh it would work for sure... maybe just a little overkill Overkill is underrated Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnny g Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 If it's just simple file transfer, and not intense activity, I'd go for a 5 Disk NAS. Running RAID 6, using Western Digital RED disks. This will allow 2 disks to fail before you lose anything. Speed is good for a home PC setup, but not great for Enterprise. SATA will suit your needs, Chris, but not the Enterprise. QNAP or Synology do some good NAS's, so I'd go with them. I personally use QNAP. QNAP TS 569L = £600ish 5x WD RED 3Tb disks = £100ea You'll have 12Tb of decent home storage then, and over a wired link, you'll get solid, consistent transfer rates. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Virus Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Ill have a look at some nas setups and might even be able to set one up for you aswell. Im shopping for groceries right now so ill have a lool in a while Cheers mate Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Virus Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 Sas is serial attached scsi if im not mistaken, look on wikipedia, they have a great article on it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nodalmighty Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 I'm about to invest in a NAS setup after a drive went down and lost a load of stuff. Network Attached Storage. Synology 2 Bay with a pair of Seagate NAS 2TB HDD's using Raid 1. Works out to about £300. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thorin Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 RAID5 is more cost effective than RAID1 as you will be losing 1 disk out of 2 QUAD is the ONLY way You guys are talking about cost effectiveness of RAID5 on 4+ disks and SAS, for someone who is likely to only need a few hundred GB for backup? Please. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Wilson Posted March 19, 2015 Author Share Posted March 19, 2015 If I can store 1tb to 2 tb that would be fine. Now no one uses actual hard paper photos it's so easy to lose sentimental value digital images Cheers, the budget is limited, but I do want to ensure this doesn't happen again! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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