[Brad]

As cheap as hard drives are, Raid 5 is silly.   Go with 1 or 10.

Have a backup plan.  Follow it consistently.  Test it.

I keep my "important" data on 2 different hard drives, an external hard drive, and burned to blu-rays which are stored elsewhere.

[*Scotty*]

kc8apf, can you recommend a better alternative to hdsentinel for HD monitoring?
Scotty

[kc8apf]

kc8apf, can you recommend a better alternative to hdsentinel for HD monitoring?
Scotty

Not really.  SMART is pretty good at telling you about certain types of failures (excessive reallocations).  Other types (frequent soft read failures) aren't reported to the host at all as they are "corrected" automagically by the drive.  The host will only see it when the problem has become severe enough that the "correction" technique no longer works.  Honestly, the best approach is to just assume that a drive will have a read failure at some point.  Have a strategy in place so that the data in that block isn't lost (have a backup or RAID).  Many, many times, the drive, but not the data, will be recoverable by simply writing to every sector and then reading from them.  If the drive is truly bad, the writes will trigger excessive reallocations and SMART will report a failure.

[*Scotty*]

Thanks for the reply, I don't have as much redundancy as I would like and a program checking HD seems like a good idea. I need to add a couple of 3 Terabyte drives to CYA.
Scotty

[JohnR]

Since we are on the topic, what's then a good dedicated NAS solution. What makes a good one?

Synology are generally well regarded. Large range, so you'd need to decide for yourself based on how much storage you need vs price etc. I use the (older) 2.5" drive version, which suits my purposes well enough.

I can't say I agree with Brad that RAID 5 is "silly"

[GentleBender]

How much fun would it be if you had to re encode everything you have if a disk fails? Even if you try to keep everything backed up to another HDD, sometimes things get lost. I agree with the Synology and have been using one for two years now, it gives me Raid 5 and has protected me from one drive failure already. I keep one spare drive handy to replace a failed HDD. Raid 10 is better since two out of five drives can fail, but chances are low that two drives will fail at the same time. Replace the failed drive immediately and chances are good that you will not lose anything.

I recommend WD Red for a NAS since it is basically a cheap enterprise class drive with better error correction for bad sectors than desktop drives. Most desktop drives will get stuck on bad sectors and if these get copied over on a RAID setup you can wind up dealing with a data recovery vendor to recover your data if it is that important. Because when more than one drive becomes unresponsive the RAID 5 is considered broken. Enterprise class server drives are built to skip over those sections so it is worth the extra cost in my opinion.

[JohnR]

Just a caution there - RAID is not a substitute for backups. You still need them. I use my NAS primarily for backups, but even then write a drive for offsite storage. Speaking of which, overdue on that...

Some people here are using crashplan I believe. Could be an option depending on how fast your network connection is and how much data you have.

Agreed on the drives. I use the baby REDs in mine 

[Odal3]

First of all - thank you you all for sharing your thoughts. Much appreciated.

Yes, very tempted in going the NAS route, but a bit too pricey for me right now with a 4+ bay synology (would restrict my other audio budget), however, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts of any alternative short-term solutions such as using an old spare computer as  a server/file storeage when needed (in other words - no need to be on 24/7). So the idea is going with 1 or 2 drives for internal desktop for now that maybe in a few months will be moved to a NAS solution.

The HGST deskstar 4TB or  HGST deskstar NAS looks pretty promising for under $200 ea. Not really sure about the difference between them yet, but assume (?) both will work. (My motherboard is an old MSI X58M and only support SATA II)

BTW: Just finished my back-up of critical stuff to an external 5TB drive - took forever at slow usb2 speeds.

[ctviggen]

I've been using a system called "unraid", which uses one parity drive and multiple data drives (and a cache drive possibility, too).  I also back up to two different drives, one of which I keep at work. With unraid, I can enlarge the system, replace a single drive (with the same size or larger), etc.  I keep a "hot spare" drive in the system as a cache drive.  If a drive goes down, I use the hot spare to replace the bad drive and order a new drive to replace the hot spare drive.  I currently have 6TB of data capacity, although I'm going to replace a 1TB drive with a 2TB drive when I have the time, so I'll have 7TB data capacity and a total of 11TB of disks.

I used a larger computer I had thought I was going to use for gaming.  So, I just turned a large computer into a NAS.

[JEaton]

Worrying about which is the most reliable hard drive indicates that you may have your priorities backward. Any instance of any model of hard drive (or SSD) can fail. Unless you want to lose data, you must approach it _expecting_ a drive to fail and plan accordingly by having reliable and frequent backups. And, if you think it's useful for your media libraries, by using RAID to keep the file store available through drive failures. Consider RAID a luxury. Most people can live without their music or movie server for a couple of days while they replace a drive. Consider backups a necessity.

If speed is a concern for editing video or photo files, do it from SSD. There's little reason to sweat differences in drive speed today when very large, fairly inexpensive SSDs are now available and are many times faster than the fastest hard drives. A quality 500GB SSD can be had for under $200 today.

[JLM]

Have most everything on two computers, an iMac (1 TB internal HD) and a MacBook Air (a 256 GB internal SSD).  The iMac is connected to an external 2 TB HD for automatic Time Machine backup with another older HD (previously used for automatic Time Machine) being stored in a safety deposit box.  The MacBook is also backed up on a 3rd 2 TB HD via Time Machine every 10 days.  A 4th 2 TB HD stands by to instantly replace any of the external HD's (if I still worked it. would be kept at the office).

[JohnR]

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts of any alternative short-term solutions such as using an old spare computer as  a server/file storeage when needed (in other words - no need to be on 24/7).

Yes you can. Others have mentioned a number of points, I just want to add that you could use crashplan to do local backups to it if you wanted. (I'm not trying to sell you crashplan, but I do use it locally to backup a Windows laptop (not mine) to a Mac Mini, it was just the simplest way ).

[JohnR]

Having said that, a couple more points. If it's a file server, you should plan to leave it on. If you have to remember to turn it on, then the chances of forgetting to do backups is vastly increased. Automate this task as much as possible.

Also, old computers do fail. Prior to getting the NAS I was trying to set up an old Mac mini that way, but it got flakier and flakier as I was trying to set it up and I eventually gave up. I guess my point is assume it will/might fail any day and don't spend money on upgrading the hardware.

[Odal3]

Thats a great point - forgetting to back up happens often in my house.

 Searching for deals right now. Came accross this handy price per TB summary for all drives available at newegg
https://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/internal_hdd/

[Odal3]

Worrying about which is the most reliable hard drive indicates that you may have your priorities backward. Any instance of any model of hard drive (or SSD) can fail. Unless you want to lose data, you must approach it _expecting_ a drive to fail and plan accordingly by having reliable and frequent backups. And, if you think it's useful for your media libraries, by using RAID to keep the file store available through drive failures. Consider RAID a luxury. Most people can live without their music or movie server for a couple of days while they replace a drive. Consider backups a necessity.

If speed is a concern for editing video or photo files, do it from SSD. There's little reason to sweat differences in drive speed today when very large, fairly inexpensive SSDs are now available and are many times faster than the fastest hard drives. A quality 500GB SSD can be had for under $200 today.

Good points here too. Yes I got a smaller 240gb ssd and it was a big boost to performance and especially to boot speed with an i7 processor (But the even more surprising was when I put Lubuntu instead of win xp on my 10+ year old computer and it actually match boot time on the windows machine with significantly better components).

The SSD was purchased to replace a failed boot drive, and since some of the other drives starting to get old I thought it was time to be proactive.

So what programs do you all use for backup? 

[Odal3]

That's a lot of backups! I try to take an external hard drive with backups of pictures, etc. every time I visit my mother in law in a different state and leave it there, and I also used to leave one in a safety deposit box at a bank but I haven't done that in a while.

[JohnR]

So what programs do you all use for backup?

I use a combination of Crashplan, Carbon Copy Cloner, and Time Machine. The last two are Mac only, the first also works for Windows and Linux. If you are running Linux (as I think you said above) then rsync and cron is a good (free) option.

[Doublej]

Crashplan is great if you have multiple machines in the house with spare disk space. Once configured, it automagically uses one computer to back up to another.

I think you might even be able to backup a computer at house A to a computer at house B.

[Odal3]

Orderd a 4 TB HGST deskstar drive (consumer version) before midnight last night from amazon and arrived today around 6pm. That's 18 hour from order to delivery. This is the first time I'm testing the new service they offer in some regions with free 1 day delivery for prime members. I'm impressed!!


JohnR/Doublej - Thanks for the input. Got a mixed bag of windows and linux computers at home. Will check out both rsync and crashplan. Will hold off a bit with the NAS drive, but probably will add another 4tb drive as a backup clone. My Netgear router has some light NAS software built-in with USB 3 ports, but my guess it is slow.

[JohnR]

My Netgear router has some light NAS software built-in with USB 3 ports, but my guess it is slow.

Slow is OK for backups, you could populate the drive with a direct connection and then move it to the router for incremental backups. However it must be reliable, no point in having a backup with corrupted files.