NAS Storage (Raid Mirror)

RAID 1 will work with 2 or more drives. But it will mirror two drives onto two drives. Not 4 onto 2.

That said, dont worry about RAID if you are only playing music from a drive or two. Simply back up each drive to another using backup software such as SyncToy.

RAID isn't all about back-up. It also about pulling large amounts of data but using more than one drive for speed (striping). OF course it has backup features inherent to it, but not needed in 99% of consumer set-ups.

-Patrick

ON a four drive nas use raid five.

As gary said...

2 drives - use RAID1 (mirroring)
4 driver - use RAID5 (striped with parity)

For a consumer environment you don't need to worry about anything else. This will give you protection against drive failure, however you shouldn't rely on RAID as your only backup as you can have problems with the drive controllers rendering all disks unreadable, or (the most common need for backup) user error will right to all the drives rendering your data corrupt.

Eloise

to be fair drobo has been out for some years, however I cannot personally recommend them after my experience.

QNAP has been rock solid so far for me (touch wood) but I do backup the music folder to a seperate drive.

quote:

you can have problems with the drive controllers rendering all disks unreadable, or (the most common need for backup) user error will right to all the drives rendering your data corrupt.

Exactly.... a RAID array set for auto backup can lead to losing data if a user deletes something accidentally.

Dont use RAID. It simply isn't necessary.

Once a month or so, pull out your backup drives and "echo" the changes from your everyday drives to your back-ups.

If you do a RAID array (or any other back-up for that matter), you better make sure it can and does back up the way you want.

A overwrites B (B is made exactly to mirror A)
A adds to B (but doesn't delete anything)
A and B are synchronized (anything missing from A is added to B and vice versa)

The point of a back-up is to have a safe copy. But if you make a mistake in A it will copy over to B. This gives you a backup of something you dont want.

Just concentrate on one drive (set of files), and back it up in a mirror/echo mode to another drive every month or so.

-Patrick

If you do decide to use RAID then with four drives rather than use RAID 5 consider RAID 10 you get the speed of striping and the benefits of mirroring.

But as everyone else has said, it is not backup, though it can improve speed and/or resiliance.

Lots of ways to do this, but I agree with Patrick that backup is key.

My music is stored on a Buffalo Linkstation. It has two 2tb drives that are mirrored. The only thing this buys me is protection against a single drive failure. If that happens, I can replace the failed drive, and rebuild the mirror. But to Patrick's point, I have no protection against controller failure, or against data corruption.

So I bought a second NAS drive -- a single 2tb drive. Each night, my backup software (called Second Copy) scans for changes to the Linkstation and copies those to my backup drive. In the event of data corruption, I am hopeful that Second Copy (which keeps up to 25 previous versions of files) would enable me to restore a clean music library, but I guess I will not know until I have to try. And I hope I never have to try!

I hope this setup gives me reasonably high availability, but I do not yet have a strategy for disaster recovery. To do that, I will need to make another copy for off-site storage, or subscribe to an internet back-up service. Been on my to-do list for a while...

Hook