Storage mess... looking to change things up. NAS? Drive Pool? Other?

[AMD T-type]

I'll try to keep this as simple and informative as possible.

I'm looking to upgrade (at least double) my storage capacity, and looking for the best way to go/bang for my buck.

I currently have two main machines in the house, my desktop (Windows 7 x64) and my server (Windows 7 x64)
How I do things now is I have one main 2TB storage drive on my desktop that I back up to a 2TB drive on my server every night.
This drive is running out of room and thus this thread was created looking for advice.

My desktop has 4 drives in it, a 120GB SSD boot drive, 250GB scratch drive, 150GB velociraptor programs/games drive, and 2TB storage drive, as per below.

My server has 4 drives in it, a 500 GB drive (boot/scratch), 1TB archive drive, 2tb backup of the desktop storage drive, and 1TB USB "portable" drive.
My server is a Shuttle with two internal SATA ports and two eSATA ports (the 2TB storage backup and 1TB Archive drive are eSATA)

I do not plan on messing with the boot/program/scratch drives, so in essence I have two 2TB drives and two 1TB drives.

So here is the question... I'm looking to at minimum double my storage space....
Do I just set up some sort of drive pooling on my server and move all 4 drives to it?
Do I buy a 3rd 2TB drive and RAID5 the three?
Do I sell everything and buy three 3TB drives and do some sort of drive pool/ RIAD/other?
Do I do something else I'm not thinking of?

As always, thanks for the help [H]


edit: as a side note, I have access to enough temporary storage to move all my data to if I need to pool/wipe/whatever all my current drives

 

[MrGuvernment]

how important is your data

if you want do to raid, with 2T or above i say do raid 6 min or have a backup of important data elsewhere.

 

[AMD T-type]

I mean, its not corporate critical data, it's all my data that I've been accumulating over the past 10 years. Music, Movies, TV Shows, Documents, Photos. So yeah I guess pretty important.

I fully understand that a RAID is not comparable to a backup solution, which is why I've always kept my main data on one drive with a duplicate drive in another computer.

Just looking for some advice on what route to take.

 

[AMD T-type]

So here's a question for anyone that uses drive pooling...

Do you backup your pool? or do you just allow the pool to operate as your storage and your backup?

 

[AMD T-type]

It's looking like a good way to go would be to put Win8 on my server and use Storage Spaces

 

[GeorgeHR]

Documents and photos appear to be the only data worth backing up.

I would have a second hard drive on line with a copy and a drive to backup to each night. (I have a USB drive that I turn on, backup to, turn off.)

If you want to back up the TV, DVDs, and music, make a copy on a set of off line drives. They should not change much.

 

[jen4950]

I'd say RAID 6 on your server and Backblaze.

And I say Backblaze because I just got 3TB back from them in one piece. Took 6 months to upload, and then sure enough, RAID array failed a couple months later.

 

[Cool1Net6]

It's looking like a good way to go would be to put Win8 on my server and use Storage Spaces

I'd hold off on Win 8 SS for now; I've heard of bad quirks like stupid slow write speeds (for parity), trouble removing drives from the pool, files going missing, etc. It needs a few months after release to get more mature.

I duplicate all important items in my pool so that I can survive a single drive failure. Then I have an external drive that backs up the more priceless files (pictures, docs, etc) once a month and is located away from my server and never always plugged in.

 

[SirMaster]

Since you are on Windows and have existing data already on your drives in NTFS I would look at FlexRAID.

FlexRAID will provide disk redundancy in case you lose a drive. You can configure it to survive as many drive failures as you want. I'm currently running a 7 disk array with 2 drives set up as parity. It's probably overkill for now but I will be expanding the array larger soon so I want 2 drive redundancy.

FlexRAID also takes care of drive pooling.

I also use Crashplan to backup my array offsite.


What's great about FlexRAID is that you can use drives of any size in the array so you can make use of all your existing drives. The only requirement is that your parity drive must be as large or larger than any of your existing drives.

Another great thing is that you can use drives that already have data on them so you will not need to format your drives to add them to the array.

Finally the other great thing is that the array is not striped like RAID or Storage Spaces so you could take out an individual drive and read it from any PC normally and then put it back into the array.

FlexRAID is only stable right now in snapshot RAID mode so that means that when you change data on your array you want to run the process to update the snapshot. You could also schedule this to run nightly and stuff too.

If the data on your storage array is going to change often then FlexRAID is not for you. Though if you just keep a scratch disk to do your downloads you should be fine.

You could also run 2 arrays. one FlexRAID array in snapshot mode and another smaller array in realtime mode if you did want to protect data that changes often.