Help Plan Home Data Storage System
 

Is there such a thing as a inexpensive disk storage system that holds 3+ terabytes?

My goal is to eventually have all our photos, music, video, etc stored on a central pool of storage, that is networked to the home computers. The central storage must be affordable, easily expandable, and allow automated (daily, no-think, no touch) backup to remote storage. I'll locate the remote storage someplace that can be networked but will still survive a house fire, like a fireproof outbuilding. Ideally I'd like everything to run on Mac OS, but I guess I could deal with a mixed Win/Mac environment.

The thing is, the storage system does not need to be super robust - if it fails, I'd simply go to the backup, and if that takes hours or a day, that is okay. It also does not need to be high-performance - I'd be serving up one movie or a couple of music streams, at most.

Right now our data is still stored on the hard drives of the Mac that created it, and backups are to external hard drives. This means we're capacity limited (my iMac G5's 160GB hard drive is rapidly filling up, each uploaded videotape is 5-7GB) and if the house burns down, everything is lost (since the external drive sits next to the Mac).

I'm just starting to research this, and my first question is whether the storage system is going to be affordable. I checked the Apple Xserve RAID and it seems way overbuilt for me. I don't need redundant power supplies, hot-swappable disks, SCSI disks, and so on. Other systems I've looked at also seem like more than I need. I think I just need a bunch of standard SATA disks, a RAID controller, and networking, in an enclosure with a power supply. Since you can get 1 TB of SATA disks for about $300-500, I am thinking $1,000 for the system.

Is this possible? Practical? Tips, anyone?

The DIY approach is what I would recommend. I have seen four drive enclosures with SATA and RAID built in for a few hundred bucks. You add the drives. I haven't actually used one yet but I see them coming to market. You might also look at the pre-built LaCie products. They are commercial versions of the above.

Would like to do this as well, using PC instead of Mac. Right now backup everything on a spare old computer and USB external drive but they are getting full.

JA

Here's what I had looked at before, apparently expandible but a bit pricey.

http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?childpagename=US%2FLayout&packedargs=c%3 DL_Product_C2%26cid%3D1115416906702&pagename=Links ys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper

I think it retails for nearly $800 and it's only 250GB to start with.

LaCie makes a 1TB system like that for $1000CDN. I looked at it today, and pondered a very similar plan, except my computers are mixed unix/windows.
I would just do differential filesystem backups at the end of the day.
I am pretty sure LaCie makes larger setups as well, but expect ~$2500 for a 3TB solution. Would a 1TB do?

I am actually adding a 300GB network drive to my current setup, totalling 900GB of networked storage. All of the network storage devices use NFS, FTP and SAMBA. I don't know what protocol mac's use.

Example http://www.cooldrives.com/ has a lot of supplies for a DIY solution.

Thanks for the DIY suggestion - seems like I might end up doing that.

Yeah, the ready-made networked storage solutions for consumers are too expensive and too small. 250GB? Hardly.

Figure a full-length movie ripped from a DVD is 4GB, 40 minutes of a mini-DV videotape is 5GB, programs transferred from TiVo are multiple GB also.

If I put all my music, DVDs, video, etc on disk, I can see wanting 1TB+ within the next year. Down the road, I could see wanting several TB. Then 2X that, for the backup.

Raw hard drive capacity is cheap. Even now, if you look for deals and rebates, you can get $0.40/GB or $400/TB. When drives go to perpendicular recording in the next year, capacity will be even cheaper. So it really burns me to pay $3-4/GB for external networked storage.

You should be compressing the movie using something like DivX to reduce the file size by at least half or more with little noticable degradation in quality.

Fibre-Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) drives might be your friend. Connectors/cabling might be a bit pricey, not sure since I haven't checked on prices in awhile, but disks are dirt cheap and I think the cards are, too. With FC-AL you could locate the server inside your house and the disk array subsystem outside in the garage or someplace (by running a cable). You could buy a large server case that has a big disk backplane, and put in a few large drives to start with, and keep adding as you feel necessary.

I'd recommend you take a gander over at http://forums.2cpu.com in their Storage section. There is a good number of people there with >1TB home storage systems, and a wealth of knowledge.

Good luck!

4gb when compressed. A commercial DVD (and now available to consumers) is dual layer which holds approx 8.5 to 9.5 gb.

I just added a 320 GB SATA drive and ate it up in a months time. Now I need to archive off to dual layer or compress to single layer dvds while I look for another good deal on more 320-400 gb drives. Slickdeals.net is your friend.

Cheapest method may be a seperate PC with a SATA interface card and several hard drives. I'd format the drives in JBOD for simplicity. We've had good luck with the 3Ware 8506-12 product. It can interface to 12 SATA disks. Fill it with 400GB drives and you have 4.8 TB. An older PC will be fast enough as long as it can handle the card. It's a good excuse to upgrade the main system, also.

Ditto.... If ya wanna get really slick, buy two controllers and two disk towers, stripe the data on one tower and mirror to the other. Linux would be a nice soilution for this, or you can try using hardware RAID at the controller level.

Do a search on "Buffalo TeraSTation 1TB NAS RAID" I seem to be having a lot of diffuculty this morning putting in a link...

Use a linux box, or multiples of them. Use lvm to bind partitions together, allowing you to do all sorts of really neat stuff with adding space dynamically, and adding more space to a RAID array without loosing what is already on it. Doubt you'd need that much - maybe a TB locally, and a good way to archive off files to DVD or tape (1 to keep locally, 2 to put in 2 different off site locations, like 2 different bank boxes at 2 different banks) on a semi-automated basis.

Oh, and you can run Linux on your mac if you want, but I'd go with cheap AMD based hardware.

With two controllers wouldn't it be duplexing?

OSX is a BSD based OS so if you have Unix boxes on your net a Mac will behave the same way.

Mac OS X can talk to the most popular file server protocols on every major server platform in the market today — including AFP, SMB/CIFS, WebDAV and NFS file services running on Mac OS X Server, AppleShare, UNIX, Linux, Novell NetWare and Windows NT, 2000 and XP servers.

Hmmmm...let me play devils advocate.

If you really need 3 Tera of storage, then you might want to start looking at a low end SAN. Yes, it will cost a lot.

Seems like I could buy a 4-drive Firewire enclosure ($300), 2 drives of 500GB each ($300 if I'm lucky), a Mac Mini ($500), and Mac OS X server ($300?) and thus for $1,400+ have 1TB storage accessible on the network, easily expandable to 2TB, without having to learn anything about Linux or SANs.

Careful here. If you have two drives in a raid you will NOT have redundency. You can mirror them but that yields half the storage. You can stripe them but if one goes you lose everything.

If you add a third drive you can go raid 5, if one of the 3 drives fail you do not lose data.

OSX has a great soft RAID controller built into it. Unless you are doing high end video editing where the data rate is critical you do not need a hardware RAID controller.

Scott