external NAS raid?

A

antok86

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im not to familiar with RAID but i think its what im looking for. im looking for an external enclosure that will connect with my home network that will use at least two hard drives to show up in my network as one drive. is this possible? would be used to store music, videos, and other files so that can be accessed on different computers, ps3, etc. i dont really want to use another computer to host this, if possible just to plug into a router. thanks
 
ok that is totally reasonable..but what do you mean by mirroring?
 
antok86 said:
ok that is totally reasonable..but what do you mean by mirroring?
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There are different levels of RAID. I'll leave it to you to Google it or look for a Wiki, but simply put, mirroring is when you have two disk that are *exact* copies of one another this is accomplished either through software or hardware (this is what the DNS-323 uses). If one disk fails you still have the other to work with and you don't lose your data. There's much more to it and many different levels, but like I said, just read up on it.
 
looks like i want RAID 1 where it appears as one drive and the idea if one fails you wont loose data. so if i have two 500gb in RAID 1 it will be a total of 1TB? or is it just two 500gb of the same data. ALso on teh dns-323 do the hard drive have to be the same? can you mix different brands of drives?
 
Do a little lite reading on Raid here.

Do some heavy reading on NAS boxes here.

But just a quick recap:

Raid 0; 2 X 500 Gig drives = 1 X 1 TB drive. Somewhat faster, but if either drive fails, entire array is lost.

Raid 1; 2 X 500 Gig drives = 1 X 500 Gig drive. No speed increase, but if 1 drives fails, your data is safe.

Raid 5 3 X 500 Gid drives = 1 X 1TB drive. May have some speed increase, array can survive 1 of the 3 drives dieing in you.

I personally own a Hammer Storage MyShare 1TB that I am using in a Raid 1 setup right now. So I have 500 Gig of storage that is usable from any of the 5 computers that are running in my house right now. I have been very pleased with m purchase so far. I have had it for about 6 months.

The beautiful thing about a NAS box is that it uses about 1/4 the amount of electricity as a server. I figure that my Nas Box will pay for itself in about 5 years on energy savings alone.

I am not familiar with the requirements of a PS3 to connect to a computer, but the reviews on Smallnetbuilder.com are pretty comprehensive. If it is relavent, he prolly checks it out.

Before you buy a NAS box, dig around on the net and read reviews about the specific model you are looking at. It is worth it to spend a little more up front to get a trouble free gadget to trust your data too.

Also, if the data is important, you should (I really mean must) budget for a way to keep a copy of the data. A hard drive can fail at any time for no reason. Raid 1 or 5 is not the same as a separate copy of your data.

If you have any other questions, let us know.

Don
 
i didnt see anything about hard drive sizes when in raid 1 can you mix different sizes. would the larger size be the backup to the smaller drive incase of it failing?
 
no in raid both drives must be the same and should really be the same make and model.
 
Most modern controllers ill allow you to mix and match different hard drive sizes, but the size of the array will default down to the smallest and slowest drive in the array.

Older controllers required identical drives.

A 320 and a 250 set of drives will give you a single 500 gig Raid 0 drive, or a 250 gig drive with backup in Raid1.

Don
 
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