• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Which raid level & best backup method for small office?

T

Tolem

n00b
Joined
May 27, 2010
Messages
33
Much to the recommendation of others here I recently setup a norco rpc-4220 case with 8 of the 2TB Hitachi drives, the HP sas expander and a areca 1680 controller.

Right now the disks are running JBOD, as I research the best raid level to use for my business. We have a 50/50 mix of large (2GB+) to small (1mb-100mb) files, lots of mini-dv videos, etc.

I've read about raid levels online, and it seemed like I wanted to go with raid 5 or 6? But then I read articles where people were talking about much higher raid levels (50/60) when you have more than 10 drives?

I have 8 of the 2TB deskstar drives now, and plan to double that slowly over the coming year.


Also is tape still the best backup method? How expensive is it to implement? Right now I am just backing up to external hard drives (of different manufactures) stored in a fire proof safe off site.
 
Your performance/storage requirements should dictate wich raid level you will end up running.

for a backup solution Tape is a good medium, or another dataset kept offsite works well too.
 
Well like I said We have about 16 usable TB of storage now, but only use 30% of that currently. We bought more drives than we needed because of hot spares, expandability / things like that.

So from what I gathered raid 6 would be the preferred choice over raid 5 because it offers 2 parity drives with just a small (5-10%?) loss in performance? We do need performance for video editing, but a 5 / 10 % loss isnt going to break the bank. Often times we will copy a video from the array to the workstations SSD disk anyway unless the array we build would end up being faster than the SSD disk. I know the Hitachi drives arnt "Business grade" raid / sas drives and that their performance isnt their selling point so im not sure how well they will do compared to a SSD
 
Go Raid 6, period. The extra cost of a $120 harddisk for an extra stripe of parity (second safety net) are a no brainer, especially when you have lots of expansion slots.

For backup of that much data, sorry but tapes are out. Especially for a small biz - to be able to back up that many terabytes to tape would require a tape system many times more expensive than just building another storage server let's say. I deal with backing up about 120Tb and the only way is by duplicating those files to another 120Tb worth of HDD's in a nearby location. I also have a hard time trusting tape technology with that much data, aside from the potential 5 figure pricetag.

Rotating backups offsite is another issue - you may want to "backup the backup" to one or multiple external 2Tb drives and rotate them offsite or put in a fireproof safe.
 
RAID 6 offers more resilliance, at the cost of 2 drives. If you don't need all the space now, which you don't, and you can expand later, which you can, than at the moment you should consider that as your top candidate.

Our corporation uses tape for backup in addition to an offsite backup. I don't think it is cheap though, but from the times I've had to get a backup, it's worked very well.
 
I kinda spaced out at the ammoutn of data you had there.... Tape is not an option for that kind of data, best backup solution would be to build an identical box in another location and replicate the data between them. then for super important data hardcopy it to tape/dvd/external HDD (tape/dvd would be better)

I would say Raid6/Raid10 with how cheap Sata drives are (SAS drives for that matter too) no reason not to anymore.
 
I think there's some misunderstanding here. Raid protects against hard drive failure. Doesn't protect against user mistakes. You want a back up solution, not a hardware failure solution. So raid won't help you here. You need back up software and optionally some hardware, like tapes or additional drives that you can make duplicates to and restore when necessary.
 
You have 5TB of data now and you are growing to 32TB of data over the next year.

I like the idea of duplicating the data using hard drives. Have a second box with removable hard drives. Mirror the data to them. Move backups off site as your needs require.

Now you need 100TB of drive space by year end. You may have enough hard drives to do your current data duplication and off site storag.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top