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Lost and looking for stoarage solution.

M

MiPilot

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Jan 7, 2008
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I own a small contracting business that has myself and a part time office employee that accesses data, located in a separate office from my main residence, and would also be accessed from the computers in the home. I use a Linksys router running DD-WRT.

Other devices are 2 desktops and 2 laptops all running W7 Ultimate.

Here is what I am thinking of doing.

I have a desktop that I am rebuilding with a i5-3570k and z77 board, 16 gigs memory, gtx470, Antec P180, 750w Psu, and Win 7 Ultimate. This system runs 24/7 as I access it remotely.

I currently have 3 - Seagate 1.5 drives as well as an older 320g drive.

My thoughts are to install a new 500g drive for my op system, and at least 2 of the drives in a raid 1 config and purchasing a back up software to back up the raid to two locations. One is on the network, in my house, and the other to be online somewhere.

I do have an issue on the reliability of the drives. I have all three listed as Caution with CyrstalDisk due to reallocated sectors count. So I am open to replacing them.

We have a 3 QB company files that would be on it as well as documents, pictures, music and video.

Is this a reasonable plan?

Would a NAS be better and why?

I am not sure if 1.5 would be enough storage as we are moving to scanning all invoices and etc as they come in. I also keep on hand all pdfs of the projects we bid ( 6-12 months if we don't win the bid).

Would I be better of to purchase a 4th 1.5 drive and run in a config that would allow me to have a total of 3 tb

Any help/guidance would be appreciated.
 
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1.5TB is a most likely a lot more space than you will ever fill up.

If you want your OS on a different drive, I would suggest a 2TB drive. They don't cost much more than a 500GB drive. But then a 128GB SSD would not cost much more either.

I would not fool around with RAID. But I would have a couple backups of the data. I like doing an incremental daily backup and then a full backup each month. Just save tehm in case I need to go back to a specific date for information.

I would keep a backup on the server that can accessed over the network. I would keep a backup at the house also.

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If you do not trust your hard drives, replace them. $500-600 should give you 5 new hard drives - OS, data, 2 backups at the office, 1 backup at home.
 
With a business, data availability can be fairly important - you may not be able to afford the downtime caused by the loss of a data drive, even if the data is backed up - so I'd create raid1 mirrors for your data, ideally with a hotspare too, especially if you aren't always around to swap out faulty hardware ASAP!
Do remember though that mirroring is not a substitute for backup - you should still do that, as you suggested!

Oh, and if you have any doubts over the state of your current drives, I'd just replace them TBH!
You could use them as mirrored OS drives perhaps, instead of buying a new 500GB drive (though I suppose it depends on just how high that reallocated sector count actually is on them)
 
Working drives break frequently. Resync your standards. Your broke drives must go.

You are a business. Start taking up time seriously. You don't want to go a day or a month without your data right? So you need raid 1, you need an identical backup config to swap in when this one breaks, and you need offsite cloud backup. Start thinking about which two identical nas you will buy and which enterprise drives you will run in them, and how the backup will work, and which cloud backup you will subscribe to
 
bAMtan2 said:
You are a business. Start taking up time seriously. You don't want to go a day or a month without your data right?
Click to expand...

Contracting businesses don't need uptime as much as other businesses might. Replacing a bad data disk with a backup from the previous night takes less than 5 minutes and is usually sufficient.

RAID is just a pain in the neck for most businesses of the type the OP operates.
 
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