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Thank you RAID! I almost lost 450GB of movies today.

Kurfer

Kurfer

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 13, 2008
214
149
I have a fairly new Western Digitial World Book in RAID configuration, I was half tempted to move everything to a single WD 1TB drive later next week. Low and behold one of the drives died, wont boot not even attached physically to another PC. Thank goodness for RAID!

How do you guys manage your library? After this I wont ever place a movie on a single disk....ever!

**EDIT: title should read "I almost lost 450GB of movies today"

It's late, i'm tired :(
 
I have my important stuff spread across multiple locations. I backup my iPhoto library to network storage, then I pull any changes from my network storage onto remote ZFS volume, and from there I send changes to S3.

Any other smaller files are backed up to my iDisk.

I'd really like to get my hands on a Drobo, but it's a bit expensive.
 
Kurfer said:
How do you guys manage your library? After this I wont ever place a movie on a single disk....ever!
Click to expand...

My library is on a single 750GB Fireware disk. It is backed up once a day to a 2TB Western Digital My Book Pro II (striped) with Time Machine.

I agree that if you don't back up regularly, using RAID mirroring is a good idea.

A.
 
I spent some time working out the best way to go with storage at home. I steered well clear of single disk solutions.

I went out at got a Synology 4 Disk RAID Cube Station and filled it with 1TB server grade drives (WD GP/RE2 drives). Yep it cost more but if anything were to got wrong with a drive I can rebuild the RAID 5 array. Even bought them from different sources at different times to reduce the likelihood of them failing at the same time. (I'm paranoid about losing it all.)

The drive only holds my DVD (.iso images) and HD content (.mkv), and I am about 200GB away from filling 3TB capacity which I stream to a diskless TVIX M6500 media adapter in the lounge. I passed on an ATV as it is so restrictive on file formats and doesn't do 1080p. IMO storage was cheaper than trying to re-encode everything into MP4 format just to play on an ATV.

I do backup my home directory from my MBP to it too, which happens over night. I also back it up to an external FW drive just in case something goes wrong when I'm out and about.

I am probably going to get another Synology as it works really well for me.
 
skp574 said:
I spent some time working out the best way to go with storage at home. I steered well clear of single disk solutions.
....deleted...
I am probably going to get another Synology as it works really well for me.
Click to expand...

I had looked at those - could you answer a few questions for me (please!)

1) What kind of write speeds do you get to that thing? I.e. copy a 2-3GB fileset and how long does it take?
2) How noisy is it?
3) Stable and easy to use with Mac?

I have a readynas NV+ and it's ok but writes blow (20mb/sec if i'm lucky) and sometimes leopard loses it and I have to re-log in the drive and so it fubars my backup program.

thanks so much, I'm thinking of either adding a raid 5 esata box, or another nas.
 
I also have a lot of movies but what I do is fill the drive to about 90% capacity and then stop adding movies. Then I make a single backup and that is all. Then I start on my second drive. The trick is to use your internal drive or small work drive to be included in your Time Machine backups until you have enough to do a 2nd drive.

I once dropped an external drive and RAID wouldn't have saved me unless someone can make RAID wireless.
 
You're welcome! ;)

In all seriousness I'm glad this came up. I've been thinking about either getting an :apple: TV or more likely a mac mini as a media centre / slave for my Mac Pro. Now that I can get 1TB drives for under $200 it has become very tempting. However one of the things holding me back is the backup issue. It sounds like a few of you have got some decent set ups, but I still might get 2 1TB drives and mirror them for the sake of simplicity.

Ah well it's all just a dream till I come up with the $1,000 or so to buy the setup.
 
Here is my way to cope with todays data flood:

Movies are never stored on internal HDDs for an extended amount of time because its too expensive/ a waste.
I only store data which is highly utilized on my internal HDDs like raw fotage, background plates, my webpages...

Movies I like are being burnd to double layer dvds /bluray because this is the optimal long time storage.

My important data is copied to a big external hdd and the very important data is mirrord onto even a second external hdd. Aditionally TimeMachine takes care of backing up ma MBP which is my only computer.
 
I ordered a Drobo, I hope it doesn't end up in my endless pile of tech junk I can't tolerate because of the noise. Money isn't an object, noise is. If this doesn't work out I may end up buying an enterprise class solution I can tuck away in a cooled closet somewhere in my house.

I'd love to keep my redundancy but have about 4TB of available space.
 
Kurfer said:
I ordered a Drobo
Click to expand...

I think it's a good choice. Lately the Drobo with 4 1TB drives would run you about $1075. I don't think there is another RAID/RAID-like solution that can beat that price point.

If the makers of Drobo had gone with USB/Firewire like almost every other company, I'd own a couple and my company would own several (we're still waiting).

A.
 
Alrescha said:
If the makers of Drobo had gone with USB/Firewire like almost every other company, I'd own a couple and my company would own several (we're still waiting).

A.
Click to expand...

I agree, hopefully it works out!
 
I have a Drobo. I too wish it had Firewire (at least 400), but USB2 is all it has. C'Mon Data Robotics, let's get Firewire or eSATA or something other than USB2!!!
 
Well I had to learn the hard way. Lost all of my movies (40 or so, iso images and mkv) on my 750gb external WD. Important stuff was on there, but was time machined, so only lost movies.

Not the end of the world, as I rarely watch them, but was a great start to a library. Don't think the drive liked being moved from the airport, to the mac mini and such.

Got a 500GB seagate today for 75 at circuit city. Putting it in my PC, so I have more back up for movies and a 5th backup for personal files.

Never happened to me before, but at least it happened on non-crucial stuff and is making me get better about it.
 
pprior said:
I had looked at those - could you answer a few questions for me (please!)

1) What kind of write speeds do you get to that thing? I.e. copy a 2-3GB fileset and how long does it take?
2) How noisy is it?
3) Stable and easy to use with Mac?

I have a readynas NV+ and it's ok but writes blow (20mb/sec if i'm lucky) and sometimes leopard loses it and I have to re-log in the drive and so it fubars my backup program.

thanks so much, I'm thinking of either adding a raid 5 esata box, or another nas.
Click to expand...

Hi there,

I have found the CS407 pretty fast. For some reason it copies faster to an SMB share rather than an AFP connection, not sure why. It takes me around 30 minutes to copy a 9GB files (over 802.11n). I have connected using gigabit ethernet and it is faster, down to about 15 minutes, that's using jumbo frames. The connections are rock solid, never had any loss of connection to share, even over wireless.

It is quiet. I did have it sitting next to the TV while setting it up and never noticed it (except when sitting in a totally quiet room). The WD RE-2 Green Power HDDs are also quiet.

It is very stable, never had to restart it. It recovers in the event of a power failure. The only thing I would really like it to do is shutdown at night then restart in the morning. But I guess it's better for the hard disks to leave it running 24/7.

Hope that helps.
 
I 3x 500GB drives to store all my stuff on, and 3x 500GB drives to back it all up. I will look into an automated solution once I get to Canada (4 weeks away!!!)
 
itunes NAS devices

Has anyone tried one of those RAID NAS devices that can emulate iTunes?

I think the idea is that the :apple:TV can connect directly to them without iTunes. As it is emulated and doesn't look like it has Apples support I am wondering how well they work?
 
skp574 said:
The only thing I would really like it to do is shutdown at night then restart in the morning. But I guess it's better for the hard disks to leave it running 24/7.

Hope that helps.
Click to expand...

I work for an enterprise storage vendor and in my experience that isn't true. In arrays that work constantly the disks fail more often, in arrays that shut the drives down when out of use (MAID systems) the disks have a longer MTBF. as a side note the only major issue with these systems is that whilst they reduce power consumption, they do cause power 'spikes' when lots of drives spin up at the same time!

Sometimes it's just down to luck though and it can depend on how hard they are being worked etc. for a home system, spinning up and down doesn't reduce the life of the disk in practical terms.
 
Alrescha said:
I think it's a good choice. Lately the Drobo with 4 1TB drives would run you about $1075. I don't think there is another RAID/RAID-like solution that can beat that price point.

If the makers of Drobo had gone with USB/Firewire like almost every other company, I'd own a couple and my company would own several (we're still waiting).

A.
Click to expand...

In case you didn't see, you're in luck. The Drobo Gen2 released last week has Firewire 800.
 
I have about 125 GB worth of movie files for iTunes and my Apple TV. The primary repository for them is my Time Capsule. Every time I rip a DVD and convert it to MP4, though, I put a backup copy on a 250 GB FireWire drive that is connected to a desktop computer on my network. I will have to get a bigger FW drive one of these days, of course, but so far, so good.

I recognize that my solution would not work very well for someone who dealt with a bunch of movie files at once. It’s great for me, though, because I rarely rip more than a couple of DVDs as part of a single MP4 file creation project.
 
Alrescha said:
I think it's a good choice. Lately the Drobo with 4 1TB drives would run you about $1075. I don't think there is another RAID/RAID-like solution that can beat that price point.

If the makers of Drobo had gone with USB/Firewire like almost every other company, I'd own a couple and my company would own several (we're still waiting).

A.
Click to expand...

There's two problems with the Drobo... well really one now.

1) USB only (the usb to lan interface doesn't fix the throughput problem) (this is fixed as of last week though with FireWire)
2) If your DROBO dies you better find another one to recover any data. Proprietary "RAID" = Boooo!
 
Alrescha said:
This is true for every hardware RAID implementation that I know of. Do you know of an exception?

A.
Click to expand...

The point is you have to get another DROBO. If my Thecus dies and Thecus isn't around anymore I can pick up a ReadyNAS by Netgear or any other NAS device that reads EXT3 and supports Raid5. If Drobo disappears down the road you may find yourself hard pressed to find one that'll help you recover your data in a reasonable time frame.
 
So is the 1 Terabyte Time Capsule worth it or should I go a different route?

I have 60 gigs of music including The Tom Leykis Show archived since 2004 till present and 200 gigs of movies/tv shows. I don't want to lose any of this.

What should I do for long term storage?

Buy a blu-ray burner and put everything on a disk? I wouldn't mind doing it.

You guys are the pros. I've never thought about doing this until I saw this thread.

So far everything is on my Seagate 500 gig external hard drive. The one with the orange light that stands up.
 
Mindflux said:
The point is you have to get another DROBO. If my Thecus dies and Thecus isn't around anymore I can pick up a ReadyNAS by Netgear or any other NAS device that reads EXT3 and supports Raid5. If Drobo disappears down the road you may find yourself hard pressed to find one that'll help you recover your data in a reasonable time frame.
Click to expand...

I don't know where you get that idea. You can not just take a raid5 set and insert it into another machine and have it work.
 
Mindflux said:
If my Thecus dies and Thecus isn't around anymore I can pick up a ReadyNAS by Netgear or any other NAS device that reads EXT3 and supports Raid5.
Click to expand...

That statement couldn't be further from the truth. In general when a set of hard drives are in a RAID array and the controller dies you will need the same card or controller to recover the array or data. You can't just throw the hard drives onto any old RAID controller and recover the array or data. The only thing you would be able to do is to create a new array thus loosing all the data that was contained on the old array.
 
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