What are my options for a multi-Terabyte home NAS? [closed]

What are my options for a multi-Terabyte home NAS? [closed]

I've got alot of DVDs and have been slowly ripping, encoding, and tagging them and I've nearly filled my WD MyBook 1TB. I'm estimating that I've got about 1.5 or 2Tb to go to complete my current collection. I've spent alot of time on the files, and the peril they are in recently struck home. I had a second 500Gb MyBook that I was using, essentially, as a scratch drive, ripping raw Video_TS folders to them, and then encoding from there. It failed spectacularly a few weeks ago. I've convinced my wife that we need to redundancy, and she's agreed (bless her heart!).

Asked by: Guest | Views: 288

Total answers/comments: 5

Comments display order:

Guest [Entry]

"I'd highly recommend a Windows Home Server (WHS) machine, such as a HP MediaSmart Server or Acer EasyStore Aspire. They are an excellent value, reliable, and very flexible (far more than even a ReadyNAS -- you've basically got a Windows 2003 environment to work with). One of these with a set of TB drives would easily fit within your budget.

WHS doesn't do RAID, but does provide configurable (and transparent) data duplication. With WHS, you can also mix and match drives and add/remove them on the fly, as with a Drobo. Honestly, RAID is just a bag of hurt in the home environment.

See a bit more info on the HP MediaSmarts in my answer here."

Guest [Entry]

"Many of these answers provide excellent network based storage and many devices are excellent devices, but as any professional system admin worth his salt will tell you...

RAID is not a backup.

It's not, plain and simple. If you plan your network storage like it is, you will be devastatingly disappointed. Especially with multiple terabyte sized drives, a single drive failure and associated rebuild will immediately and brutally read and write to every sector on every drive at least once. This often causes unknown faults to surface on the remaining disks, which trashes your data.

So, consider the options carefully and don't forget that despite RAID's excellent advantages, they should not be considered substitute for a permanent backup. Consider adding an external drive or two, and regularly copy the most critical files off the raid, and into a safe location."

Guest [Entry]

What I did to build a 6 TB storage array is build a cheap linux box, < 200$, threw in 2 4 port pci sata controllers, and just filled it up with hard drives. Using ubuntu and mdadm I have a multi use, somewhat powerful NAS.

Guest [Entry]

I'm a fan of the Western Digital ShareSpace NAS. They have capacities up to 8TB, RAID0, 1, and 5 options, and a significant amount of software on the NAS for streaming and downloading. I was partial to the Active Directory integration when I was looking at them, but I assume you won't be using that at home. They're very reasonably priced and will definitely fit within your budget.

Guest [Entry]

"For most big storage needs, snagging one of these diskless systems and loading it with commodity drives seems like the best solution.

If you need more performance, then grab a used Dell PowerVault off of eBay which uses SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives which may last longer and have faster reads."