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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
RAID storage
Andrew Nelles, Photographer
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Chicago | Ill. | usa | Posted: 7:43 PM on 11.09.09 |
->> Awhile back I posted asking for advice on what to use for RAID storage, a user had recommended this affordable option
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/usb/raid_1/Gmax
I purchased a 1TB set-up, and have been very pleased. A year and 1TB later, I need to buy some more storage. I'm planning on purchasing a second one, but before I do so I was wondering if anything else on the market would be a better option.
Thoughts?
Thanks in advance. |
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Matthew Mullen, Photographer
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Brick | NJ | USA | Posted: 8:45 PM on 11.09.09 |
->> Andrew,
If you are looking for a more long term solution a DROBO has been amazing. I've had mine for 2 years and it has been absolutely trouble free. www.drobo.com |
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Daniel Putz, Photographer
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Jefferson | MD | USA | Posted: 9:02 PM on 11.09.09 |
| ->> +1 vote for a Drobo. Upgrading is extremely easy (RAID is considerably harder). |
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Andrew Nelles, Photographer
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Chicago | Ill. | usa | Posted: 9:27 PM on 11.09.09 |
->> The Drobo looks tempting. Here is my question, for current owners.
Lets say I buy a Drobo, and 2 1TB drives. I then transfer the contents of my RAID to the Drobo. Could I then format the 2 drives formerly in my RAID, and reinstall them in the Drobo for use? |
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Robert Longhitano, Photographer
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North Wales | PA | USA | Posted: 9:38 PM on 11.09.09 |
->> Andrew I have the same setup. Very I'm happy with it and I would get another one in a second. But I've also been keeping up to date on the Drobo solutions though I'm not sure it's worth the extra $$$.
In regards to the Guardian MAXimus, I read somewhere if one drive fails you have to replace it with the exact make and model of the good drive for it to rebuild the data. Is this true? That might be a problem if the manufacture discontinues that model.
Aside from that question (please excuse the thread hijack), if I do have 1 drive go down in a two drive RAID-1 (Mirrored) setup could I mount the good drive to get the data off that one without having to replace the bad drive in Guardian MAXimus? |
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Andrew Nelles, Photographer
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Chicago | Ill. | usa | Posted: 9:52 PM on 11.09.09 |
->> No problem on the hijack Robert, I've been wondering that also well. From what I have heard it does sound like it needs to be the same exact model.
The more I read about the Drobo, the more it sounds like a better long term solution.
I'm just trying to wrap my head around how it keeps the data safe. It sounds like, if I put 4 1TB's in it, as I intend to do, that will give me 3TB for storage and it uses the 4th TB for protection. So it's not mirroring... |
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Christian del Rosario, Photographer
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San Jose | CA | USA | Posted: 9:54 PM on 11.09.09 |
->> "Lets say I buy a Drobo, and 2 1TB drives. I then transfer the contents of my RAID to the Drobo. Could I then format the 2 drives formerly in my RAID, and reinstall them in the Drobo for use?"
Yes. The Drobo is not sensitive to the size/speed/brand of the drive, so technically you could mix and match all the drives in the Drobo array.
Also, any drive you insert into the Drobo is automatically formatted, so no format beforehand is required. |
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Bradley Wakoff, Photographer
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Francis Specker, Photographer
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Riverside | CA | USA | Posted: 10:35 PM on 11.09.09 |
->> I have had a Drobo for the last year.
One of the drives failed and I popped it out and replaced it with another drive and it rebuilt itself and was back to normal in a day.
The weakness is that in the period of the time it was rebuilding the data, I was flying without a net, if a second drive failed during that time, I would lost the data. I do have another back-up of that data, so I would have been safe, but it would have been a pain to reload all the photos.
The new Drobo Pro has dual disk drive redundancy. So 2 drives can fail and you are still safe.
A raid mirror doesn't make a lot of sense since you are you using half your storage for back-up. You can get a cheap Raid 5 server and even HP has a turnkey solution using Windows Home Server software.
I think if you are using Mac OSX, then a Drobo is a natural fit with a FireWire 800 interface and plug and play software. If you are super geeky, then you might roll your own Linux based server in a beige box.
I think if you have a lot of bandwith, you might look into "cloud" based solutions like Amazon S3, Carbonite, Backblaze, Photoshelter, etc, but 1-2TB could take a hell of lot time to upload. |
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Kent Miller, Photographer
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New York | NY | USA | Posted: 10:48 PM on 11.09.09 |
| ->> This is all well and good. But. What if DROBO goes out of business and you have no support for your expensive box? I guess it's the same for any backup storage. A friend recommended I make 3 copies of everything. So I bought a http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/FWU2ES2HDK/ from OWC and started making 3 copies of each drive. Place them back in the silver bag and keep them in different locations. This has been a bit tough since I have 15+ TB of files. Good thing drives are cheap. I don't think any way is the best way. They all fail. I hope to lower the risk of loss if I can. k |
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Robert Seale, Photographer
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Houston | TX | USA | Posted: 1:14 AM on 11.10.09 |
->> Kent...I shared your worries about Drobo being a proprietary system.
I'm using a SATA connected drive array from Firmtek. I have two of these and have been very happy with them.
http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-5pm/
There are no cables to connect....they slide in and connect to the backplane seamlessly.
You can configure these however you want. One thing to keep in mind about RAID 1, is that a directory error can render both drives unusable. You still need a backup, even if you are using a mirrored RAID solution.
These drive arrays are easily hot-swappable, so you can make backups to store off-site very easily. |
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David Harpe, Photographer
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Louisville | KY | USA | Posted: 6:31 AM on 11.10.09 |
->> I have a similar setup to Robert. The Firmtek arrays are really nice. Easy to use and cost-effective. I augment the setup with a couple of SATA bare-drive docks. These are great to have when you quickly want to spin up a drive from your archive and don't want to fool with screwing it into a caddy.
With data storage, there are three types of threats you have to protect against: Physical drive failure, soft-deletions (operating system corruption/viruses/accidental deletion), and real-world disaster (fire/flood/theft).
Robert makes a great point about mirrored RAID. While it's a perfect solution for protecting against a physical drive failure, a mirrored RAID operates at a very low level - garbage in/garbage out. So it really only protects you from one specific threat: a hard drive failure.
The strategy I use is a classic, straightforward volume set approach. There are two types of sets: A single, "active" set with current projects, and multiple "archive" sets for long-term storage. Within each set there are three drives: A primary working drive, an onsite backup, and an offsite backup.
For the working set, backups are done nightly to the onsite backup drive (or immediately if I have a big shoot). Backups are done at the file-level (not RAID) using a program called Cobian Backup (freeware). Backup drives are only up and spinning when needed - otherwise they are offline to avoid loss in case of a virus.
About once a week I rotate in the offsite copy of the active set for updating (swap the offsite and onsite copies). Archive sets are basically permanent storage, so they don't need updating on a regular basis...just spin the offline drives up every now and again to make sure they still work.
Drive technology changes frequently, so I'm usually updating storage capacity on the working volume. The old drives from the active set become archive sets. This works well because by the time they are full enough to require archiving, they've been live for a year or more - which means they are due a rest.
Something to avoid regardless of your approach is buying all of your drives from the same manufacturer. Mirrored RAID really wants you to use the same brand of drive - not a wise move. Western Digital recently had a run of 1TB drives that all had a click-of-death problem. I had three of those drives that I'd bought at the same time (on sale) and two of them failed within a couple of weeks of one another (yikes!), but fortunately not in the same set. Every manufacturer has a bad run every now and again, so be wary.
If you have multiple terabytes of data, there is no magic solution to protect against all three threats outlined above. You still have to make three copies of the data to be protected, which means you need to own three times as much storage as you're actually using. It comes with the territory, there are no shortcuts.
The other thing to consider is what your options are if the unthinkable happens. When a drive fails in a Drobo, you're relying on a black-box piece of technology from a relatively young company to save you. If it doesn't work, you really are screwed.
If you use a more distributed approach and get caught somehow with a single-drive failure and no backup copies, you at least have the option of sending it to one of the various white-room recovery services with decades of experience in doing this type of work. These services work best when things are recovered at the file-level. Your odds in that nightmare scenario are far better with a simple, non-raid drive versus a drive pulled out of a complicated system like a Drobo.
Like so many things...simple is usually much better when it comes to reliability. |
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Kent Miller, Photographer
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New York | NY | USA | Posted: 10:08 AM on 11.10.09 |
->> I'm using a SANS DIGITAL TR5M 5 with a HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 card to control it on my Mac Pro.
This thing is maxed out so I am thinking about buying another one or the 8 bay version. Even with RAID 5 if the box or card fry is the data still accessible? How much work will it be to get up and running? I have no idea? I think the best way is what David is talking about. Simple drives times 3.
Thanks for the informative post David! |
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Jonathan Castner, Photographer, Assistant
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Longmont | CO | USA | Posted: 10:58 AM on 11.10.09 |
->> RAID is not a system for archiving data. It's a way to keep data accessible while you are using it. If you have a DROBO or any other RAID unit you do not have your data archived. If there is a fire/flood or other disaster and your RAID array is damaged you are screwed because all you data is in one place. The Luminous Landscape article alludes to an off site backup system using web storage to cope with the issue.
Here's what I'm doing. I ingest my CF cards to an internal drive that I use for working on my files and my 1TB LaCie NAS that is set up in RAID1. I weekly transfer all new and modified files from my working drive to the NAS for safety. When the NAS is filled I copy the contents to dual hard drives via my removable drive bay for archiving. Each archive drive is labeled and put into separate Pelican cases. One drive case stays in the office and the other in a safe off site location.
This way I have my current data duplicated in house and all my old data duplicated off site. I thought about the web based archive but the load times would be insane and considering that I'm regularly filling 500gb drives I'll forgo the slightly higher expense to use the dual drive archive system. |
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Eric Canha, Photographer
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Brockton | MA | United States | Posted: 11:09 AM on 11.10.09 |
->> If you have a DROBO or any other RAID unit you do not have your data archived.
Johnathan even worse recently the firmware for the Drobo Pro was updated. During the upgrade I was warned to backup the data on the Drobo. While the 6tb of data that is sitting on the Drobo is backed up both here and on bare drives off site, the warning does emphasize that the data on the Drobo is NOT immune from failure. I actually called Drobo to see if there was a safe way of doing the update to minimize risks and was told to buy a second drobo to backup the first. Sounds like "rinse and repeat" |
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