Quote:
Originally Posted by beepbeep
Basically any "partition copy" software will work. Some are better than others. Good ones work directly under Windows (otherwise it might be a hassle for boot CD to find correct drivers for your 15 year olds SCSI adapter). Good ones copy only used sectors and ignore empty ones.
And make sure you chose correct source drive when copying. It's worth mentioning again. Ask me how I know 
I am beliver in portable NAS boxes compared to real servers for up to 10TB storage. Server will eat a lot of power when on 24/7 and all those fans (CPU, power, HD cooling) tend to clog. A simple ReadyNAS box will take 4 SATA discs, has only one fan, chews 50W when active and less than 7W when discs are asleep. Quite handy size as well (~shoebox)
P.S.
What kind of RAID for 38TB array? You probably know this, but using RAID-5 or such on more than 10TB is asking for trouble. Bit rot is guaranteed and rebuild times are looong, which might as well take one more drive down. |
The other RAID boxes are spread over 3 different NAS boxes. As you said, tons cheaper and easy to swap a drive. We don't do any mission critical stuff. We just store many TBs of aerial photos and maps.